Trading twitter: Amateur recorders and economies of scientific exchange at the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds

Abstract

Scientists have long engaged in collaborations with field collectors, but how are such collaborations established and maintained? This article examines structures of collaborative data collection between professional scientists and various field recorders around the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. The Library collects animal sound recordings for use in education, preservation, and entertainment, but primarily in the scientific field of bio-acoustics. Since 1945, the Library has enlisted academic researchers, commercial recorders and broadcasters (such as the British Broadcasting Corporation), and amateur sound hunters in its expansion. I argue that the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds managed to craft and sustain a crucial network of contributors through creative and strategic brokering with its collection of recordings/data. Drawing on notions from exchange theory, I show that sound recordings were valued not just as scientific data, but also as copyrighted commodities that could be bought, sold, traded, and converted in a range of economic, social, and symbolic capitals within collaborators' respective social fields. Thus, aligning collaborators' interests, these exchange relations enabled the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds to negotiate amateur recorders' reliability, willingness to share work, and commitment to scientific standards, as well as the bonds that solidified their collaboration with the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds. Attending to the micro-economics of data exchange, this article thus brings into perspective the multi-dimensional processes through which data-flows are managed.

The Science of Listening in Bioacoustics Research: Sensing the Animals' Sounds

“…Scientific studies that use sound to gather data are not likely to expand the experience of listening, but instead to project their findings onto public digital archives for the purposes of community engagement and knowledge mobilization. Joeri Bruyninckx (2015), for example, points to the growing collaborations between 'citizen scientists' and the Cornell Library of Natural Sounds, which is in need of the public's hobby recordings in order to expand its growing catalogue of bird songs. The collaborative and empirical use of sound reinforces Julian Henriques's (2011) thesis that 'sounding' binds together everyone and everything involved in the production of sound: human (researchers), non-human (birds, monkeys, fish, plants), and para-human (including the technologies discussed below, such as ARUs and pattern-identifying software).…”

Resounding Contestation: The Ambiguous Status of Sonic Skills

“…And granting the amateurs authorship of the recordings and the distinguished status of research associates brought symbolic capital into play. Bruyninckx (2015) has explained in these Bourdieusian terms how the Library secured volunteers' prolonged investment in its undertaking.…”