Beyond the ‘long tail’ metaphor, the distribution of data within the scientific field has been described in terms of ‘data wealth’ and ‘data poverty’. Steve Sawyer has sketched a political economy of data in a short essay (a slightly modified version of this paper is freely accessible here). According to him, in data-poor fields data are a prized possession; access to data drives methods; and there are many theoretical camps. By contrast, data-rich fields can be identified by three characteristics: pooling and sharing of data is expected; method choices are limited since forms drive methods; and only a small number of theoretical camps have been validated. This opposition leads to an unequal distribution of grants received, since data wealth provides for legitimacy to claims of insight as well as access to additional resources.
While Sawyer describes a polarity within the scientific field with respect to funding and cyberinfrastructures, which he sees as a means to overcome obstacles in data-poor fields, the KPLEX Project will take a look into how contents and characteristics of data relate to methodologies and epistemologies, integration structures and aggregation systems.
kplex-project.com 