Sabina Leonelli
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 101161 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Sabina Leonelli |
| NOMBRES | Sabina |
| APELLIDO | Leonelli |
| FIRMA | LEONELLI S |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7815-6609 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 298 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2005 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Not All Research Environments are Created Equal
This paper discusses three forms of structural injustice associated with disparities in the resources available to researchers, and the opportunity researchers have to pursue their scientific goals. These are: (1) resource injustice; (2) focus injustice; and (3) labour injustice. I argue that such structural injustice has significant epistemic implications, resulting in: shifts in research content; the exclusion of substantive portions of scienti…
Convenience AI
Understanding the ‘spaceflight treatment’ in plant space biology
The boundaries between targeted interventions, background factors, and confounders are concerns in all biological experimentation. Plant space biology takes these concerns to new territories not just geographically but also epistemically because of the operational constraints of collecting data in the multi-stressor spaceflight environment. In consequence, a central challenge in this field is the disentanglement of the various factors involved in…
Investigating research practices
Qualitative research provides rigorous methods not only for investigating behavioral or social issues, but can also be used for exploring epistemic issues related to science and its practices. There is growing scholarly awareness that important aspects of science can be best understood through qualitative analyses and cannot be captured using more traditional textual sources such as publications or archival documents or via more quantitative or f…
Reconciling data actionability and accountability in global health research
The requirements for actionability and accountability in data infrastructures are often viewed as incompatible, creating a trade-off where enhancing one diminishes the other. Through a comparative analysis of two data infrastructures used to share genomic data about the SARS-CoV-2 virus, we argue that making data actionable for knowledge development involves a commitment to ensuring that the data in question are representative of the phenomena be…
Is Data Science Transforming Biomedical Research? Evidence, Expertise, and Experiments in Covid-19 Science
Biomedical deployments of data science capitalize on vast, heterogeneous data sources. This promotes a diversified understanding of what counts as evidence for health-related interventions, beyond the strictures associated with evidence-based medicine. Focusing on COVID-19 transmission and prevention research, I consider the epistemic implications of this diversification of evidence in relation to (1) experimental design, especially the revival o…
A Critical Framing of Data for Development
In times where the use of big data and AI has progressed from an ambitious promise to a formative part of development work, we seek to contextualize and anchor data for development applications and its criticisms to foundational scholarship on the historical trajectory and contemporary implications of datafication and AI. In this contribution, we review Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias’s The Costs of Connection, analyzing the entanglement of cap…
Circulating bodies
Data and Society
Evincing Offence
A reader can expect the abstract, paper and keywords to discuss descriptions of evidence, classification schema, seizure rules and more generally the data frictions, constraints and limitations associated with the processing of digital forensic evidence involving children in England. The widespread availability and use of digital devices both enables criminal acts and helps to detect them. The production and circulation of indecent images of chil…
Introduction
Reframing the environment in data-intensive health sciences
In this paper, we analyse the relation between the use of environmental data in contemporary health sciences and related conceptualisations and operationalisations of the notion of environment. We consider three case studies that exemplify a different selection of environmental data and mode of data integration in data-intensive epidemiology. We argue that the diversification of data sources, their increase in scale and scope, and the application…
Accelerating agriculture
Accelerating the rate of genetic gain has in recent years become a key objective in plant breeding for the Global South, building on the availability of new data technologies and bridging biological interest in crop improvement with economic interest in enhancing the cost efficiency of breeding programs. This paper explains the concept of genetic gain, the conditions for its emerging status as an indicator of agricultural development and the broa…
Open Science and Epistemic Diversity
I argue that Open Science as currently conceptualized and implemented does not take sufficient account of epistemic diversity within research. I use three case studies to exemplify how Open Science threatens to privilege some forms of inquiry over others, thus exasperating divides within and across systems of practice, and overlooking important sources and forms of epistemic diversity. Building on insights from pluralist philosophy, I then identi…
The changing climates of global health
International audience
Mobilizing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows. Covid-19 and the Politics of Research at the Borders
This is the final version. Available on open access from Routledge via the DOI in this record
Open science, data sharing and solidarity
Research, innovation, and progress in the life sciences are increasingly contingent on access to large quantities of data. This is one of the key premises behind the "open science" movement and the global calls for fostering the sharing of personal data, datasets, and research results. This paper reports on the outcomes of discussions by the panel "Open science, data sharing and solidarity: who benefits?" held at the 2021 Biennial conference of t…
Where health and environment meet
The use of big data to investigate the spread of infectious diseases or the impact of the built environment on human wellbeing goes beyond the realm of traditional approaches to epidemiology, and includes a large variety of data objects produced by research communities with different methods and goals. This paper addresses the conditions under which researchers link, search and interpret such diverse data by focusing on “data mash-ups”—that is th…
From Fair data to fair data use
The paper problematises the reliability and ethics of using social media data, such as sourced from Twitter or Instagram, to carry out health-related research. As in many other domains, the opportunity to mine social media for information has been hailed as transformative for research on well-being and disease. Considerations around the fairness, responsibilities and accountabilities relating to using such data have often been set aside, on the u…
Experimenting with co-development
Actionable data for precision oncology
Huge amounts of genomic data produced by researchers around the world undermine data-centred discovery and therapeutic development. This paper considers how researchers make decisions about the actionability of specific datasets and the conditions that allow such data to be trusted. We discuss the case of COSMIC, a leading cancer genomics database which aggregates a large amount of sources. We research what the actionability of cancer data means …
Data Journeys in the Sciences
This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge…
Intellectual directions for History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2019–2023
To begin a 5-years stint as editors-in-chief of what is probably the oldest journal dealing with philosophical, historical and societal aspects of the life sciences is both a big challenge and a big responsibility.We received a journal revitalized by the wonderful job made by Staffan Müller-Wille and his staff, as well as the assistance of Springer in bringing HPLS fully into the digital age, and for this we are very thankful.In this brief editor…
How to choose your research organism
Despite August Krogh's famous admonition that a 'convenient' organism exists for every biological problem, we argue that appeals to 'convenience' are not sufficient to capture reasoning about organism choice. Instead, we offer a detailed analysis based on empirical data and philosophical arguments for a working set of twenty criteria that interact with each other in the highly contextualized judgements that biologists make about organism choice. …
Extreme’ organisms and the problem of generalization
Many biologists appeal to the so-called Krogh principle when justifying their choice of experimental organisms. The principle states that "for a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied". Despite its popularity, the principle is often critiqued for implying unwarranted generalizations from optimal models. We argue that the Krogh principle should be interprete…
What’s so special about model organisms
What difference does quantity make? On the epistemology of Big Data in biology
Is Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of data involved, but rather in (1) the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both within and outside of the scientific community and (2) the methods, infrastructures, technologies…
Repertoires
We propose a framework to describe, analyze, and explain the conditions under which scientific communities organize themselves to do research, particularly within large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. The framework centers on the notion of a research repertoire, which encompasses well-aligned assemblages of the skills, behaviors, and material, social, and epistemic components that a group may use to practice certain kinds of science, and whose…
What Counts as Scientific Data? A Relational Framework
This paper proposes an account of scientific data that makes sense of recent debates on data-driven and ‘big data’ research, while also building on the history of data production and use particularly within biology. In this view, ‘data’ is a relational category applied to research outputs that are taken, at specific moments of inquiry, to provide evidence for knowledge claims of interest to the researchers involved. They do not have truth-value i…
Integrating data to acquire new knowledge
Introduction
Re-thinking organisms
Introduction
This essay examines the notion of “translational research,” which has become a dominant form of the institutionalization and practice of contemporary biomedicine, as an entry point into theorizing questions of knowledge, value, and their articulations. We are interested in locating translational research in a conjuncture that is marked, on the one hand, by a “postgenomic” moment in the life sciences and, on the other, by the capitalization of bio…
Data Shadows
This editorial critically engages with the understanding of openness by attending to how notions of presence and absence come bundled together as part of efforts to make open. This is particularly evident in contemporary discourse around data production, dissemination, and use. We highlight how the preoccupations with making data present can be usefully analyzed and understood by tracing the related concerns around what is missing, unavailable, o…
When humans are the exception
Cross-species comparison has long been regarded as a stepping-stone for medical research, enabling the discovery and testing of prospective treatments before they undergo clinical trial on humans. Post-genomic medicine has made cross-species comparison crucial in another respect: the 'community databases' developed to collect and disseminate data on model organisms are now often used as a template for the dissemination of data on humans and as a …
On the Locality of Data and Claims about Phenomena
Bogen and Woodward characterized data as embedded in the context in which they are produced (‘local’) and claims about phenomena as retaining their significance beyond that context (‘nonlocal’). This view does not fit sciences such as biology, which successfully disseminate data via packaging processes that include appropriate labels, vehicles, and human interventions. These processes enhance the evidential scope of data and ensure that claims ab…
Actionable data for precision oncology
Huge amounts of genomic data produced by researchers around the world undermine data-centred discovery and therapeutic development. This paper considers how researchers make decisions about the actionability of specific datasets and the conditions that allow such data to be trusted. We discuss the case of COSMIC, a leading cancer genomics database which aggregates a large amount of sources. We research what the actionability of cancer data means …
How Does One "Open" Science? Questions of Value in Biological Research
Open Science policies encourage researchers to disclose a wide range of outputs from their work, thus codifying openness as a specific set of research practices and guidelines that can be interpreted and applied consistently across disciplines and geographical settings. In this paper, we argue that this "one-size-fits-all" view of openness sidesteps key questions about the forms, implications, and goals of openness for research practice. We propo…
How to choose your research organism
Despite August Krogh's famous admonition that a 'convenient' organism exists for every biological problem, we argue that appeals to 'convenience' are not sufficient to capture reasoning about organism choice. Instead, we offer a detailed analysis based on empirical data and philosophical arguments for a working set of twenty criteria that interact with each other in the highly contextualized judgements that biologists make about organism choice. …
Open science, data sharing and solidarity
Research, innovation, and progress in the life sciences are increasingly contingent on access to large quantities of data. This is one of the key premises behind the "open science" movement and the global calls for fostering the sharing of personal data, datasets, and research results. This paper reports on the outcomes of discussions by the panel "Open science, data sharing and solidarity: who benefits?" held at the 2021 Biennial conference of t…
Science and the politics of openness
examines the collaborations between scientists and the entertainment industry.He is currently writing the book Indecent Science, which will explore the historic interactions between science, religion and movie censorship.Adam Kokotovich is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Minnesota, studying invasive-species risk assessment and management.An interdisciplinary social scientist, he is interested in highlighting and opening to …
Making Organisms Model Human Behavior
ArgumentWe examine the criteria used to validate the use of nonhuman organisms in North-American alcohol addiction research from the 1950s to the present day. We argue that this field, where the similarities between behaviors in humans and non-humans are particularly difficult to assess, has addressed questions of model validity by transforming the situatedness of non-human organisms into an experimental tool. We demonstrate that model validity d…
Extreme’ organisms and the problem of generalization
Many biologists appeal to the so-called Krogh principle when justifying their choice of experimental organisms. The principle states that "for a large number of problems there will be some animal of choice, or a few such animals, on which it can be most conveniently studied". Despite its popularity, the principle is often critiqued for implying unwarranted generalizations from optimal models. We argue that the Krogh principle should be interprete…
The Time of Data
This article considers the temporal dimension of data processing and use and the ways in which it affects the production and interpretation of knowledge claims. I start by distinguishing the time at which data collection, dissemination, and analysis occur (Data time, or Dt) from the time in which the phenomena for which data serve as evidence operate (Phenomena time, or Pt). Building on the analysis of two examples of data reuse from modeling and…
Reframing the environment in data-intensive health sciences
In this paper, we analyse the relation between the use of environmental data in contemporary health sciences and related conceptualisations and operationalisations of the notion of environment. We consider three case studies that exemplify a different selection of environmental data and mode of data integration in data-intensive epidemiology. We argue that the diversification of data sources, their increase in scale and scope, and the application…
Experimenting with co-development
Concealment and discovery
This paper analyses the role of information security (IS) in shaping the dissemination and re-use of biomedical data, as well as the embedding of such data in material, social and regulatory landscapes of research. We consider data management practices adopted by two UK-based data linkage infrastructures: the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage, a Welsh databank that facilitates appropriate re-use of health data derived from research and routin…
From Fair data to fair data use
The paper problematises the reliability and ethics of using social media data, such as sourced from Twitter or Instagram, to carry out health-related research. As in many other domains, the opportunity to mine social media for information has been hailed as transformative for research on well-being and disease. Considerations around the fairness, responsibilities and accountabilities relating to using such data have often been set aside, on the u…
Sticks and carrots
The Open Science (OS) movement has been seen as an important facilitator for public participation in science. This has been underpinned by the assumption that widespread and free access to research outputs leads to (i) better and more efficient science, (ii) economic growth, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises wishing to capitalise on research findings and (iii) increased transparency of knowledge production and its outcomes. The…
Open Science and Epistemic Diversity
I argue that Open Science as currently conceptualized and implemented does not take sufficient account of epistemic diversity within research. I use three case studies to exemplify how Open Science threatens to privilege some forms of inquiry over others, thus exasperating divides within and across systems of practice, and overlooking important sources and forms of epistemic diversity. Building on insights from pluralist philosophy, I then identi…
Infrared metaphysics
Infrared metaphysics
Scientific Understanding
On the Locality of Data and Claims about Phenomena
Bogen and Woodward characterized data as embedded in the context in which they are produced (‘local’) and claims about phenomena as retaining their significance beyond that context (‘nonlocal’). This view does not fit sciences such as biology, which successfully disseminate data via packaging processes that include appropriate labels, vehicles, and human interventions. These processes enhance the evidential scope of data and ensure that claims ab…
Re-thinking organisms
Introduction
What’s so special about model organisms
When humans are the exception
Cross-species comparison has long been regarded as a stepping-stone for medical research, enabling the discovery and testing of prospective treatments before they undergo clinical trial on humans. Post-genomic medicine has made cross-species comparison crucial in another respect: the 'community databases' developed to collect and disseminate data on model organisms are now often used as a template for the dissemination of data on humans and as a …
Why the Current Insistence on Open Access to Scientific Data? Big Data, Knowledge Production, and the Political Economy of Contemporary Biology
The collection and dissemination of data on human and nonhuman organisms has become a central feature of 21st-century biology and has been endorsed by funding agencies in the United States and Europe as crucial to translating biological research into therapeutic and agricultural innovation. Large molecular data sets, often referred to as “big data,” are increasingly incorporated into digital databases, many of which are freely accessible online. …
Bigger, faster, better? Rhetorics and practices of large-scale research in contemporary bioscience
Global data for local science
The use of online databases to collect and disseminate data is typically portrayed as crucial to the management of ‘big science’. At the same time, databases are not deemed successful unless they facilitate the re-use of data towards new scientific discoveries, which often involves engaging with several highly diverse and inherently unstable research communities. This article examines the tensions encountered by database developers in their effor…
Integrating data to acquire new knowledge
Joseph November, Biomedical Computing
The introduction of computers and its implications are among the most important and least understood aspects of twentieth-century biomedicine. Achieving a reliable and accurate history of this process is crucial to several contemporary debates in science studies and policy, ranging from the potential to rationalise medical treatment and cut associated costs, to data mining as a strategy for biomedical discovery and the free dissemination of scien…
Introduction
This essay examines the notion of “translational research,” which has become a dominant form of the institutionalization and practice of contemporary biomedicine, as an entry point into theorizing questions of knowledge, value, and their articulations. We are interested in locating translational research in a conjuncture that is marked, on the one hand, by a “postgenomic” moment in the life sciences and, on the other, by the capitalization of bio…
What difference does quantity make? On the epistemology of Big Data in biology
Is Big Data science a whole new way of doing research? And what difference does data quantity make to knowledge production strategies and their outputs? I argue that the novelty of Big Data science does not lie in the sheer quantity of data involved, but rather in (1) the prominence and status acquired by data as commodity and recognised output, both within and outside of the scientific community and (2) the methods, infrastructures, technologies…
Making Organisms Model Human Behavior
ArgumentWe examine the criteria used to validate the use of nonhuman organisms in North-American alcohol addiction research from the 1950s to the present day. We argue that this field, where the similarities between behaviors in humans and non-humans are particularly difficult to assess, has addressed questions of model validity by transforming the situatedness of non-human organisms into an experimental tool. We demonstrate that model validity d…
Life out of sequence
We are living in a moment of overwhelming hype over everything about “big data,” when promises of overarching understanding and unlocking the secrets of life are again littering mass media and scie
Sticks and carrots
The Open Science (OS) movement has been seen as an important facilitator for public participation in science. This has been underpinned by the assumption that widespread and free access to research outputs leads to (i) better and more efficient science, (ii) economic growth, in particular for small and medium-sized enterprises wishing to capitalise on research findings and (iii) increased transparency of knowledge production and its outcomes. The…
What Counts as Scientific Data? A Relational Framework
This paper proposes an account of scientific data that makes sense of recent debates on data-driven and ‘big data’ research, while also building on the history of data production and use particularly within biology. In this view, ‘data’ is a relational category applied to research outputs that are taken, at specific moments of inquiry, to provide evidence for knowledge claims of interest to the researchers involved. They do not have truth-value i…
Data-Centric Biology
How Do Scientists Define Openness? Exploring the Relationship Between Open Science Policies and Research Practice
This article documents how biomedical researchers in the United Kingdom understand and enact the idea of “openness.” This is of particular interest to researchers and science policy worldwide in view of the recent adoption of pioneering policies on Open Science and Open Access by the U.K. government—policies whose impact on and implications for research practice are in need of urgent evaluation, so as to decide on their eventual implementation el…
The disruptive potential of data publication
No description available
Is Not Much To You’
The Open Science (OS) movement promises nothing less than a revolution in the availability of scientific knowledge around the globe. By removing barriers to online data and encouraging publication in Open Access formats and Open Data archives, OS seeks to expand the role, reach and value of research. The promises of OS imply a set of expectations about what different publics hope to gain from research, how accountability and participation can be …
Repertoires
We propose a framework to describe, analyze, and explain the conditions under which scientific communities organize themselves to do research, particularly within large-scale, multidisciplinary projects. The framework centers on the notion of a research repertoire, which encompasses well-aligned assemblages of the skills, behaviors, and material, social, and epistemic components that a group may use to practice certain kinds of science, and whose…
Managing the transition to open access publishing
To manage the transition to the open access (OA) model of scholarly publishing, we need to understand better what enables, encourages and inhibits the adoption of OA publishing among scientists, and to appreciate individual differences within disciplines. The study adopts a psychological perspective to elucidate motivations, capabilities and opportunities for OA publishing among bioscientists in the UK. To identify differences within the discipli…
Computer Science (34 obras) · Sociology (27 obras) · Epistemology (25 obras) · Data science (23 obras) · Political science (20 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Philosophy and History of Science (16 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Biology (14 obras) · Engineering ethics (11 obras)