Practicing, Materializing and Contesting Environmental Data

This special theme investigates the proliferation of environmental data content and practices. Big Data analyses often focus on data sources culled from online activities such as social media use, yet environmental data is now being generated from a range of sources, from citizen sensing to environmental agency monitoring, and from arboretum archives to air quality modelling, as well as social media postings. The special theme attends to the multiple practices, materialisations and contestations that emerge in relation to environmental data, and asks how these specific modes of data—as environmental—challenge or rework approaches to Big Data.