Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
We can only claim that the ritual is the same in the sense that we can claim that each
time our scientists collect stream data they are stepping in the same river twice. What
persists across each iteration of the ritual is the
comparability
of the data collected; it is
the purpose and orientation of their activity. This comparability is the achievement of
carefully coordinated effort that stretches out every week to the sixteen field sites and
back to the labs at the University of Maryland.
In the language of anthropology, what differentiates routine from ritual is the meaning
for participants. Routines are dry and mechanical. While routines are always adapting
to local circumstance, changes make little difference to those involved. Rituals are lived.
They may be enjoyable or tedious, but rituals are experienced as a feature of member-
ship. Rituals tie activities to a past, and through enactment, reproduce that past into
the present and future. The continuance of the data set is what sets the activities of these
ecoscientists apart from routine.
An Orientation to Comparability
Arrival at each geographic site is initiated with a quick visual inspection for discrepan-
cies: Is anything notably out of place? Are there higher or lower flows of stream water,
residues of flooding, evidence of a disturbed sampling machine, graffiti on a bridge, or
a strange smell? Such observations become the first raw data collected at each site,
qualitatively recorded on the field sheet.
Four artifacts leave each field site: a field sheet and three bottled samples of stream
water. The field sheet is a single-sided piece of paper; it begins each week as the same
empty chart and ends each collection day with the qualitative and quantitative inscrip-
tions recording observations for each of the sixteen sites. It is the documentary trace
of the day's work. The samples of water only become data later; one of these bottles is
processed in labs at the University of Maryland at the end of the day while the other
two bottles travel to Milbrook, New York, for analysis weeks later. The top of the field
sheet is analogous to the start of the collection day: it begins by documenting the date,
the data collectors, and qualitative notes about the weather. The next step is calibration
of the instruments, checking their accuracy against standardized acid and temperature
metrics available in the labs at Maryland.
At the riverbed, the field site itself becomes data in front of our eyes through a
practice of observation and a set of practical interventions. Smell is evaluated at
each site and recorded on the field sheet: terse but florid descriptions accompany a
number between 0 and 4: “pickles and propane, 3,” “no smell, 0,” “benzene (which is a
