News Archive
Information Territory and Data Terrains: an examination of the Anti-Locust Research Centre
鈥溾�ur own disciplinary backgrounds have also combined in a project-specific approach that has developed through improvisation within the archive as a working space, and porting some concepts from ecology and ecological methods into historical and geographical analysis.鈥�
鈥淭o gain a foothold on the quantities of information, in December 2016 we weighed all 168 of the correspondence boxes (roughly two-thirds of the total boxed archive) using a set of DYMOTM 10 kg digital scales. Together, they weigh 691.77 kg, or the equivalent of roughly 350,000 locusts. That may seem a lot, but it would constitute only 0.875% of the more than 40 million individuals known to have comprised at least one recorded swarm.鈥�
鈥溾�e find that the spatial structure and temporal dynamics of the ALRC information system were just as important to understanding its activity as the behaviour and life cycle of the desert locust – if not more so.鈥�
Acknowledgements
This paper draws on a wider examination of the ALRC archive dating back to 2016. The original research was funded in part by two awards from the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Science in Culture scheme (AH/N007085/1 & AH/R004633/1), and we thank our collaborators on those projects, Amanda Thomson and Katherine Brown, and institutional support from the Natural History Museum, the National Museum of Wales, and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation's 鈥淟ocust Watch鈥�. For the purpose of open access, the author(s) has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising.
The data depicted in the visualisations is available at https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/195436/