This project aimed to provide a philosophical framework through which the current emphasis on data-intensive biology, and more generally the role played by data in scientific inquiry, can be studied and understood. To achieve this, Sabina Leonelli focused on the history and contemporary instances of what she called data journeys: the ways in which scientific data are disseminated in order to function as evidence for knowledge claims. As she shows in her work, the more widely data are disseminated and re-used, the more significant their epistemic role is deemed to be. To be transformed into knowledge, scientific data need to be ordered, labeled, and packaged so as to make them portable—that is, capable of being picked up and transported across different sites.
During her time at the MPIWG, taking inspiration from the lively intellectual environment provided by the Sciences of the Archive project, Sabina Leonelli finalized a book manuscript provisionally titled Researching Life in the Digital Age: The Epistemology of Data-Intensive Biology.