A Centrifuge of Calculation: Managing Data and Enthusiasm in Early Twentieth-Century Bird Banding

Abstract

Beginning in 1920, bird banding in the United States was coordinated by an office within the U.S. Biological Survey that recruited volunteers, issued permits, distributed bands and reporting forms, and collected and organized the data that resulted. In the 1920s and 1930s, data from thousands of volunteers banding millions of birds helped ornithologists map migratory flyaways and census bird populations on a continental scale. This essay argues that the success of the bird-banding program depended on a fragile balance between the centripetal effects of national coordination and the centrifugal effects of volunteer enthusiasm. For various reasons, efforts to maintain this balance were largely abandoned by the Bird-Banding Office from the late 1930s onward. Nevertheless, the first two decades of the national bird-banding effort provide an example of how a "citizen-science" project that generates "Big Data" can produce significant scientific results without subordinating the enthusiasms of volunteers to the data-collecting needs of professional scientists.

Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance

“…This is prominent in the context of crowdsourcing for environmental projects (Woodcock et al 2017) where volunteers' time, skill, knowledge, and energy become digitally obfuscated (Dagiral and Peerbave 2012;Scholz 2015). This becomes particularly problematic when enterprises are heralded as democratising science, but in reality, engage volunteers as 'cogs in a machine' to execute pre-set tasks under disciplined supervision (Benson 2017;Woodcock et al 2017). Increasing smartphone use and internet accessibility blurs distinctions between producers and consumers of nature content online.…”

Capture‐recapture

“…The flyway, which abstracts the movements of millions of tagged birds between their seasonal homes, quantifies and maps an animal's “fixes” (recorded locations), initially using trapping and banding data and, later, radio tracking. This is done to determine habitual movements (Benson 2017; Cronon 2012; Kim 2018; Sanderson 1966). Flyways and hot spots are what Murphy (2017, 25) terms “phantasmagrams,” or calculative objects imbued with desires, potential, and feelings that go far beyond their facticity.…”

A Culture of Competition

“…69 One of the most interesting developments here is how the shared relevance of statistics and metrics to professional and fantasy sports has blurred prior boundaries and allowed fans and gamers to become actual experts whose knowledge is respected and sometimes even paid for by professional teams. 70 In contrast to citizen science, where the data collection of amateur volunteers often needs to be fostered and simultaneously carefully disciplined to make it productive, 71 sports fans are prolific sources whose insights can easily be tapped by the industry.…”