Over the course of the Museums and Society project, postdoc Roos Hopman conducted research on the mass-digitization of natural history specimens (dried plants, pinned insects, dinosaur bones) and their attached labels. She conducted interviews with collection workers, scan operators, digitization managers and software engineers, and participated in digitization projects herself to learn about the promises, logics, and difficulties (spoiler alert, there are many) of translating millions of natural history specimens into digital formats. In this paper, recently published in Big Data & Society, you can read about her findings in detail. Going into the particularities of the mass-digitization of snail shells at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, Roos Hopman demonstrates the socio-material conditions in which natural history data are produced, and opens up discussion on what paying attention to digitization practices can teach us about the politics of mass-digitization and the broader project of mobilizing natural history data for biodiversity research.
The publication can be found here.