Workshop
Introduction
Trajectories of big data platforms: a multi-disciplinary and trans-domain approach
The idea of organising this workshop stemmed from the European Research Council-funded project Medical Translation in the History of Modern Genomics, an exploration of the history of genomic science across three different species: the baker and brewers’ yeast, the domestic pig and Homo sapiens. One of the main conclusions of this project is that the affordances and limitations of the large-scale datasets that characterise genomics today are shaped by the ways the communities that produced them were organised, their goals and visions, the scientists and institutions they included and excluded, and the tools and resources they had at their disposal.
This means that, although at a first glance the yeast, human and pig reference genomes appear to be very similar scientific objects – and the current genomic databases present them as essentially the same thing – what they are understood to represent and do differs substantially. The histories of the communities of yeast microbiologists, pig animal geneticists and human molecular biologists that produced and use them diverge in their levels of funding and influence, hierarchies within them and epistemic goals.
The apparent uniformity and underlying diversity of genomics represents an opportunity for addressing other knowledge domains and the data they produce. It was this opportunity of investigating synergies and differences across data that we explored throughout the workshop.