Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 8.1
A completed field sheet
streams at all: to us they appear as sewage and drainage pipes. In the exurbs, our guides
tell us, the water might be filtered down from private septic systems. Visually, very little
sets the sampling sites apart from their surrounding urban landscape. Some of the sites
are marked by discrete metal boxes containing automated sampling equipment, but to
our untrained eyes these pass as electrical infrastructure.
Traveling in a dusty van piled with equipment, our ecoscientist team spends most of
the day together—stopping occasionally to collect samples of water, take temperature
measurements, and share a meal. The ritual has been repeated thousands of times, but
no single practical or material element endures the years: students graduate to faculty,
instruments become outdated or imprecise, even buckets wear out. We cannot even
say that it is a routinized practice that persists, for that has been modified to fit novel
instrumentation, changes in the sites of collection, or the execution of new subprojects
in data collection.
