Snails, time, data: On the politics of mass-digitization and the possibility of data drift

Abstract

In natural history museums around the globe, museum staff are working on making collections of specimens (such as insects on pins, snail shells, dried plants, mounted birds) digitally available through online databases en masse. The mass-digitization of specimens is urgent especially now, so museum actors and biodiversity scientists stress, as natural history collections could provide the biodiversity sciences with crucial data for research into the effects of climate-change induced biodiversity loss. This paper investigates the processes and practices through which these biodiversity data are produced. It argues that the work of data production requires the negotiation of- and grappling with different temporalities, and that attending to these temporalities contributes to a further understanding of the politics of mass-digitization. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin's collection of snail shells, the paper brings into view the work required to make snail specimens and their metadata digital. Following steps in a mollusk digitization workflow—meant to streamline and scale up digitization processes—it attends to the misalignment of rhythms; the importance of informal cleaning labor; the negotiation of social, biological, and colonial temporalities in practices of label transcription; and the anticipatory and expansive logics of mass-digitization. Drawing on snails’ ability to “drift,” it raises data drift as a way of engaging with natural history collections and their data.