Datafied Encounters as Representational and Relational:

A more-than-human Perspective on the Biodiversity Citizen Science Project Artportalen

Abstract

To tackle the climate crisis and current biodiversity loss, scientists and citizens collaborate through citizen science projects. In the Swedish species observation system Artportalen, species sightings are turned into data and thereafter drawn upon in environmental governance and other official decision making. While this approach suggest that Artportalen’s data is representative of reality, this article takes a more-than-human approach that considers existing data and nonhuman others as social participants beyond humans to explore inhowfar encounters surrounding the project can be understood as relational instead of representational. Drawing on the concept of encounters to interrogate these relationships, we conducted and analysed nine semi-structured interviews and identify four themes: an anthropocentric data-driven perception on a ‘representational’ digital map; an ecocentric worldview shaped by ‘relational’ encounters; the shaping of data through the ‘science’ context; and the assemblages of nonhumans, data, and humans that create motivation and interest in biodiversity citizen science. We conclude by discussing the tensions emerging through the different perspectives that shape encounters.