This project was funded by the AHRC under the Digital Transformations Big Data call, and ran from 1 January 2014 to 31 March 2015.

The research team were:

• Dr Jo Bates (Principal Investigator)
• Dr Yuwei Lin (Co-Investigator)
• Paula Goodale (Research Associate)

The project aimed to pilot a new approach for better understanding and communicating how socio-cultural values and practices are articulated in the transformation of weather data on its journey from production through to various contexts of ‘big data’ collation, distribution and re-use; and, how these socio-cultural values and practices themselves transform as they interact with the data at various moments over the course of its journey.

The project asked the following questions:

• What is the ‘journey’ that weather data produced by the UK’s Met Office takes from its production through to its collation and re-use as ‘big’ weather data in different contexts?
• What socio-cultural values and practices are articulated in the transformation of this data on its journey from production through to various contexts of collation, distribution and re-use, and how do these socio-cultural values and practices themselves transform as they interact with the data over the course of its journey?
• What institutional policies and practices, and government policies and legislation, shape the distribution and licensing of weather data for re-use in different contexts?
• How can the complexity of the socio-cultural dynamics shaping the production, collation, distribution and re-use of ‘big’ weather data be communicated to a wider audience?

To answer these research questions, we developed four distinct, but interconnected case studies, which enabled exploration of socio-cultural values and practices shaping weather data production, collation, distribution and re-use across institutions of the state and market, and in the collective actions of citizen groups. The case studies focused on: the production of the weather datum by the UK’s Met Office; the public and institutional policy context shaping its distribution; the re-use of the weather datum within key centres of UK Climate Science including the Met Office Hadley Centre, the weather risk and derivatives markets in the UK’s financial sector, and citizen science projects including the Old Weather Project.

We published a number of papers from this project:

• Bates J, Goodale P, Lin Y-W & Andrews P (2019) Assembling an infrastructure for historic climate data recovery: data friction in practice. Journal of Documentation, 75(4), 791-806. View this article in WRRO
• Bates J & Goodale P (2017) Making Data Flow for the Climate Risk Market. Television and New Media, 18(8), 753-768. View this article in WRRO
• Bates J (2017) Big data, open data and the climate risk market In Brevini B & Murdock G (Ed.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication (pp. 83-93). Palgrave Macmillan View this article in WRRO
• Lin Y, Bates J & Goodale P (2016) Co-observing the Weather, Co-predicting the Climate: Human Factors in Building Infrastructures for Crowdsourced Data. Science and Technology Studies, 29(3). View this article in WRRO
• Bates J, Lin Y-W & Goodale P (2016) Data journeys: Capturing the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 205395171665450-205395171665450. View this article in WRRO
• Bates J, Goodale P & Lin Y (2015) Data Journeys as an approach for exploring the socio-cultural shaping of (big) data: the case of climate science in the United Kingdom. iConference March 2015 Proceedings (pp 1-16). https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/73429
• Goodale P, Bates J & Lin Y (2015) Mapping Data Journeys: Design for an interactive web site. iConference March 2015 Proceedings (pp 1-4). https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/73757

I also presented our work on Data Journeys at the 2018 ESRC Methods Festival:

• Bates, Jo (2018) Data Journeys: Capturing the socio-material constitution of data objects and flows. In: NCRM Research Methods Festival 2018, 3rd – 5th July 2018, University of Bath. (Unpublished) http://eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/4203/

As part of the 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.

And, as a side project we also received a small amount of funding from the Sheffield Undergraduate Research Experience scheme for the Sheffield Raspberry Pi Station project – https://sheffieldpistation.wordpress.com/