Paper short abstract:

Acknowledging databases as projected forms of knowledge, this paper examines how biodiversity taxonomic data is transformed as it moves from locally specific domains into the global Catalogue of Life, and how such transportation creates new topological forms of taxonomic knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Maps require the representational flattening of three-dimensional global surfaces; this transformation is called a 'map projection.' Databases, too, project compressed versions of reality--a reality that is transformed in any number of ways, distilled into specific measurements and values, and recombined into schemas and ontological relationships. Central to the organization of these biodiversity databases are biological taxonomies, which provide a new terra firma upon which all digital objects within a database take their shape. This paper uses ethnographic methods to examine the intellectual composition of biodiversity database taxonomies, and in particular, the Catalogue of Life (CoL), an authoritative taxonomic framework that concatenates disparate taxonomic databases into a uniform resource, to unpack how these digital spaces project and represent new topological spaces of biodiversity knowledge. How are subsidiary taxonomies assessed for inclusion into, and reformulated to conform to, the CoL data standards? How are points of ontological incommensurability managed and reconciled? How are taxonomies 're-scaled' through these various layers of reformulation? I explore the inherent tension between a global taxonomy's position as an intellectually comprehensive and authoritative infrastructure, and the way its uniform representation of knowledge dilutes the spatial diversity of contributed taxonomies, and potentially excludes divergent modes of representing, classificatory interpretation, and entity relationships. This analysis pulls from various literatures, including information studies, infrastructure studies, biodiversity studies, and systematics. It seeks to broaden our understanding of how technical infrastructures reshape the location- and temporally-specific values of scientific knowledge in big data repositories.