Domesticating data: Traveling and value-making in the data economy.

Data are versatile objects that can travel across contexts. While data's travels have been widely discussed, little attention has been paid to the sites from where and to which data flow. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork in two connected data-intensive laboratories and the concept of domestication, we explore what it takes to bring data 'home' into the laboratory. As data come and dwell in the home, they are made to follow rituals, and as a result, data are reshaped and form ties with the laboratory and its practitioners. We identify four main ways of domesticating data. First, through storytelling about the data's origins, data practitioners draw the boundaries of their laboratory. Second, through standardization, staff transform samples into digital data that can travel well while ruling what data can be let into the home. Third, through formatting, data practitioners become familiar with their data and at the same time imprint the data, thus making them belong to their home. Finally, through cultivation, staff turn data into a resource for knowledge production. Through the lens of domestication, we see the data economy as a collection of homes connected by flows, and it is because data are tamed and attached to homes that they become valuable knowledge tools. Such domestication practices also have broad implications for staff, who in the process of 'homing' data, come to belong to the laboratory. To conclude, we reflect on what these domestication processes-which silence unusual behaviours in the data-mean for the knowledge produced in data-intensive research.

Resisting decay: On disposal, valuation, and care in a dementia nursing home in Denmark.

This paper approaches institutionalized dementia care as a site of societal disposal, valuation, and care for human life. Drawing upon six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork and ten qualitative interviews carried out in a Danish dementia nursing home in 2014, we analyze how nursing home staff, through everyday care, uphold the value of life for residents in severe mental and physical decline. We argue that life's worth is established when residents gain qualities of personhood and agency through substitution processes carried out by staff. Yet the persistent absence of conventional personhood and autonomous agency in residents (i.e. capacities for memory, consciousness, language, and mobility) evokes experiences of ambiguity in staff and relatives of residents. We close the article with a discussion of this ambiguity and the significance of the nursing home as care institution in the welfare state. Dementia care, we propose, is not only about preserving the lives of people with dementia. At stake in the daily care practices around severely disabled residents in the nursing home is the very continuance of the main principles of the welfare society.

Humanity at the Edge: The Moral Laboratory of Feeding Precarious Lives.

At the heart of anthropology and the social sciences lies a notion of human existence according to which humans and animals share the basic need for food, but only humans have the capacity for morality. Based on fieldwork in a pig laboratory, a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), and a dementia nursing home, we follow practices of feeding precarious lives lacking most markers of human personhood, including the exercise of moral judgment. Despite the absence of such markers, laboratory researchers and caregivers in these three sites do not abstain from engaging in questions about the moral status of the piglets, infants, and people with dementia in their care. They continually negotiate how their charges belong to the human collectivity and thereby challenge the notion of 'the human' that is foundational to anthropology. Combining analytical approaches that do not operate with a fixed boundary between human and animal value and agency with approaches that focus on human experience and virtue ethics, we argue that 'the human' at stake in the moral laboratory of feeding precarious lives puts 'the human' in anthropology at disposal for moral experimentation.

Selective Reproduction: Social and Temporal Imaginaries for Negotiating the Value of Life in Human and Animal Neonates.

This article employs a multi-species perspective in investigating how life's worth is negotiated in the field of neonatology in Denmark. It does so by comparing decision-making processes about human infants in the Danish neonatal intensive care unit with those associated with piglets who serve as models for the premature infants in research experiments within neonatology. While the comparison is unusual, the article argues that there are parallels across the decision-making processes that shape the lives and deaths of infants and pigs alike. Collectivities or the lack thereof as well as expectations within linear or predictive time frames are key markers in both sites. Exploring selective reproductive processes across human infants and research piglets can help us uncover aspects of the cultural production of viability that we would not otherwise see or acknowledge.

OECD guidelines on open access: commercialization in disguise?

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has published a new set of principles and guidelines to promote open access to datasets and results from publicly funded research. However, there is reason to think twice about the implications of making demands for transparency and open access for publicly funded research only. How will such demands affect incentives and research agendas? Might this new regulation of publicly funded research have undesirable effects on the quality and value of research? Placing the OECD guidelines in a broader context of research regulation, we argue that they might provide a further push toward collaboration with commercially sponsored research and reinforce incentive structures that favour the creation of commercial value.