Open access to research data has become an issue in many contemporary sciences. One of them is Historical Climatology, a discipline drawing on archival materials to study the climate’s past. Based on fieldwork, the article explores the construction of a shared database by a group of historical climatologists and describes the strategies and hopes built into that infrastructure. I examine how the possession and provision of data relate to issues of recognition and legitimacy, thereby turning database construction into a practice of social import. Further, I argue that taking into account the diversity of research materials from which climate data is constituted – historical documents, tree-rings, ice-cores, etc. – is crucial for apprehending both the status of distinct types of data and the status of distinct research groups in the scientific field under investigation here.
Academic training, especially at the undergraduate level, is a marginal topic in science studies today. Scientific practices have commonly been approached through studies of research contexts—most visibly, the lab—and only sporadically through studies of the classroom or other teaching contexts. In this article, we draw attention to the pivotal role that academic training plays in the formation and reproduction of thought collectives. Such training, in shaping what students think about their field and what they understand as proper ways of doing science, is an important site of what we call epistemological enculturation. Based on a comprehensive literature review, we make several suggestions on how epistemological enculturation can be studied at the level of training scenes, a concept we develop in the article. This includes a discussion of the methodological as well as theoretical difficulties that occur when analysing academic training in action.
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