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The Sawyer Seminar’s November 15 guest was Dr. Sabina Leonelli. Dr. Leonelli teaches Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Exeter, where she is also the co-director of the Egenis Centre for the Study of Life Sciences. Her book Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016. She is now working on translating her 2018 book, Scientific Research in the Era of Big Data, into English from its original Italian. Both deal abundantly with the recent shifts and innovations in how researchers process and understand scientific data. In both her public talk on Thursday, November 14, and Sawyer Seminar lunch discussion, Dr. Leonelli walked us through the fundamentals of and distinctions between Big Data, Open Data, and FAIR Data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-Usable); these distinctions—and mindful discussions about them—is increasingly necessary as, to quote Leonelli in Data-Centric Biology, “the rise of data centrism has brought new salience to the epistemological challenges involved in processes of data gathering, classification, and interpretation and…the social structures in which such processes are embedded” (2). As Leonelli described it, Big Data is definied by their capacity to move, be (re)used across situations & disciplines, and (re)aggregated into different useful and usable platforms. To elaborate here: while there is “no rigorous definition of Big Data,” we use them, in general, to complete large-scale projects that may not valuably be done at a smaller scale, often to extract new insights about an entire world, community, or issue. Humanist examples of this in practice would Read More

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In: Sabina Leonelli
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On November 15th, Dr. Sabina Leonelli spoke to the participants of the Sawyer Seminar. As a historian and philosopher of science, she is currently the Co-Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences and has recently worked on a five-year grant about data access, openness, and infrastructure entitled The Epistemology of Data-Intensive Science. In her conversations at the Friday seminar, Dr. Leonelli focused on practices surrounding data collection and reuse, aiming to move towards a future of Open Data as the standard. One of her recent publications, an op-ed entitled “Data Shadows: Knowledge, Openness, and Absence,” spoke directly to many of the themes central to the Sawyer Seminar. She defines shadows, beyond being mere absences in data, as “the multiplicity of motives, goals, and conditions through which data may be construed as (in)significant, partial or complete, (un)intelligible, or (in)accessible.” Consequently, the degree to which these shadows exist depends on the context in which the data is considered, especially when data is being reused by parties other than the original creators. In her conversation with seminar participants, Dr. Leonelli discussed her vision for data use and distribution today, which involves most data being open-access, rather than owned by companies or individuals, as well as having the necessary metadata and methodological descriptions to make it valuable to others. This allows data to be reused, recontextualized, and further studied as more information becomes available, potentially allowing for discoveries in numerous fields. Dr. Leonelli identified several challenges in creating and maintaining open data, as well as some Read More