Climate & environmental data

Published 31/1/2021

I became interested in environmental data flows as a research topic after an interview for my PhD research on the UK’s Open Data initiative. A policy maker I spoke to got very excited about something called ‘weather derivatives’ in the midst of discussing the re-use of public sector information. I did a bit of research into these financial products when I got home and then put it to one side until I’d completed my PhD.

A year or so later, I was awarded an AHRC grant for The Secret Life of a Weather Datum project (with Co-I Yuwei Lin) in which we developed the data journeys approach to explore the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows between different sectors and organisations in meterological data infrastructures. I’d become fascinated in how data produced in very local settings, e.g. a temperature gauge at the side of the road, end up circulating through a variety of global data infrastructures in climate science and financial markets, and how all these data journeys brought people embedded in culturally very different spaces into new forms of relation with one another. We wrote up our research on this project in a number of publications listed below.

As a side project to SLWD, I also received a small amount of funding from the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience scheme for the Sheffield Raspberry Pi Weather Station project – https://sheffieldpistation.wordpress.com/ We ran public engagement events using the Pi Weather Station at the V&A in London, a Manchester Girl Geeks event, and at events run by the University of Sheffield such as Festival of the Mind.

My PhD student Dan Grace (co-supervised with Andrew Cox) has also undertaken research broadly in this field, exploring what a convivial library might be in the context of the climate crisis.

I’m now in the early stages of some new research exploring climate related data flows, and have a new PhD student Anajoyce Katabalwa who is researching agricultural data sharing in Tanzania.

List of publications related to environmental/ climate data:

A part of the Secret Life of a Weather Datum project, we also created a website that allowed people to explore the data journeys we investigated. Unfortunately, due to some technical updates we have had some challenges with the website, but you can check out the Internet Archive version here – and also check out some of the research data we collected on the project here. Our efforts to open some of our qualitative research data – with consent of the participants – was quite innovative at the time.