Books Forum
Digital conservation
A review of the website ARKive.org Reviewed by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany
BioSocieties (2010) 5, 295–298. doi:10.1057/biosoc.2010.8
ARKive.org is dedicated to conveying knowledge about biodiversity and the urgency of its conservation. The producers of this website, essentially the British charity-trust Wildscreen, present it as an attempt to keep an audio-visual record of life on earth as it was at the end of the twentieth century, and to make it available to all. The rationale is that exposing a large audience to still and moving images of threatened species will enhance knowledge and favor the wish to protect them. Launched in 2003, ARKive is promoted as ‘a key resource accessible to all, from scientists and conservationists to the general public and school children’.1 Parading key green personalities such as Edward O. Wilson and David Attenborough, it participates in the trend within the conservationist discourse which calls for the development of a so-called ‘public ecology’. Situated ‘beyond biology and beyond the norms of modern science’ (Robertson and Hull, 2001), public ecology heralds the active engagement of life scientists in the political arena on questions related to the conservation of biodiversity. It draws on resources from the natural and social sciences as well as from a variety of other fields such as religion, economics, management and so on (Pandey, 2003). That ARKive partakes in this movement is suggested by the name of the website itself, which plays on several metaphors to convey the sense of its reliability. On the one hand, it is presented as a searchable database, or better, as the name suggests, as an archive. It thus
becomes endowed with the epistemic value traditionally vested in these repositories: ARKive stands as a comprehensive set of data from which a coherent body of knowledge of the natural world can be assembled. On the other hand, the obvious reference to Noah’s Ark, and the notion of salvation it carries, nods towards yet another prominent cultural symbol of authority, religion. Despite the claims that ARKive is of interest for all, it is difficult to pinpoint the website’s exact ambition. The wealth of visual material available yields an impressive virtual field trip, but the field trippers better know their trade. The huge quantity of material accessible can also be the downside of the project. The catalog is subdivided following the Linnean classes, and within each class, the species are ordered alphabetically, according to their common name. The classification keys are the organisms’ taxonomical family, their habitat, and finally their level of endangerment, taken from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. No tool is available to make sense of the diversity of life. In ARKive, the idea of evolution, often used as an organizational principle, is superseded by the ideal of conservation. The multiplicity of life forms ceases to be what needs to be explained, and becomes a given that must be preserved and/or managed. ARKive is a convenient source of visual material, and it certainly allows for a quick overview of the state of biodiversity conservation as well as of the efforts deployed to give public significance to the cause. But its contribution to the understanding of the debate surrounding it remains to be demonstrated. It has been remarked that environmental activism and science communication were regular bedfellows, and that the Internet had in recent years become a much favored medium for this association (Yearley, 2008). It has also been observed that historically, science communication has often been the way chosen to advertise popular practices of knowledge production as legitimate modes of participation in the scientific endeavor. At ARKive.org, it seems that the communication around environmental issues serves as an effective springboard for advocat-
Jean-Baptiste Gouyon holds a PhD in sociology from the University of York (UK), and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His research is about popular science, the public understanding of science, and the relation between science and society, with a focus on natural history film-making and how it is legitimated as a culture of knowledge production.
1 The quotes in this review are taken from the website, www.arkive.org. r 2010 The London School of Economics and Political Science 1745-8552
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ing natural history film-making as a legitimate mode of knowledge production. The content and organization of the species’ records combine textual and visual material, the latter being given pride of place as a vehicle of knowledge over any other kind of medium. A picture representing one individual occupies the center of the page for each species. Underneath, a set of clickable miniatures provides access to further visual material, films or photographs. The video clips are very short sequences, edited from pre-existing natural history films. They are either single sequences taken from one film or a collage of short sections taken from different films. When several videos are available for an organism, one provides an overview of the organism and the others illustrate different facets of its life story. Animals are shown mating, feeding and grooming their offspring, hunting and so on. In the case of vegetals, the other clips emphasize aspects of the ecological web in which the organism is inserted. Overall, this prominence of visual artifacts asserts the notion, essential to the culture of natural history film-making, that genuine knowledge of natural objects will originate primarily from a visual encounter. The textual material, assembled from the work of life scientists, is maintained at the periphery. Accessible through different rubrics listed on the left-hand side of the screen, it is a compilation of natural historical knowledge (descriptive, mixing esthetical considerations with morphological features) and elements about the nature of the threat the species faces as well as the politics in the service of its conservation. The encyclopedias and reports from conservation organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) or the IUCN used for the elaboration of this material are acknowledged in a reference list at the end of each record. ARKive is meant to spread knowledge of the diversity of life on earth, and the films play an important role in the realization of this objective, insofar as ‘Without wildlife films and photographs we would have little knowledge of the plants and animals that share our planet’. This role is made most evident in a promotional clip accessible from the homepage, and conspicuously featuring David Attenborough, the trustworthy figure of British natural history television. It starts with the pounding of a heartbeat, suggesting a matter of urgency. The first images are black-and-white footage from an earlier age of natural history film-making, implicitly linking ARKive to the historical roots of the practice. Following a transition effect, images taken from the 296
database – they exhibit its logo – are then displayed and Attenborough intonates: A vast treasure of wildlife images has been accumulating over the past century. Yet no one has a clear idea of its full extent or indeed of its gaps y Until, that is, now. ARKive is going to put that right, and it will be an invaluable tool in the future for anyone concerned with knowledge and care for wildlife in the world. After this introduction, the video unfolds with visual evocations of the assemblage of the collection and of its utilization, positioning the locale hosting the database at the center of a branching network feeding Bristol with raw material, and from there spreading, via the Internet, ordered and labeled footage across the world. Thus presented as an imperialistic enterprise of collection and display, ARKive is portrayed as the ultimate stage of a century of development of natural history film-making. And if it does not necessarily help making sense of the diversity of life, ARKive appears as the instrument that was missing to provide a sense of purpose to the practice of filming nature in late modern times. The films are objects of knowledge indispensable to the conservationist enterprise and they deserve to be safeguarded. Ultimately, the immediate purpose of ARKive is not so much the protection of endangered species as the preservation of endangered artifacts of high epistemic value, natural history films. Ironically, these visual objects get endowed with extra value when what ARKive is intended to prevent occurs, and the species they depict go extinct. The database already lists 20 species in this case. One of those is the thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf. The emotional impact of the images is high, since it offers the possibility to gaze at an animal considered to have become extinct over 70 years ago. The effect is further reinforced, reaching to the dramatic, by the title given to the video on ARKive: ‘Thylacine – last known individual, 1936’. These films of extinct species can be seen as so many admonitions about the ill fate awaiting the entire catalog. But they also illuminate the postulate that natural history films are genuine objects of knowledge of the natural world because they permit the observation of natural objects across time and space. The images of the thylacine encapsulate the last remaining possibility of ever acquiring any kind of knowledge of the way this extinct marsupial behaved. The discourse sustaining ARKive insists that its claimed epistemic
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value derives from the forecasted disappearance of both the artifacts (films and photographs) and the entities they represent, the animals. The website thus highlights a general characteristic of archives, the notion that they are not exclusively about memorizing a past, but also about anticipating a future, and deriving cognitive legitimacy from such prediction. The website placed under the auspicious patronage of David Attenborough constitutes one of the six initiatives of public outreach of Wildscreen, a UK-based not-for-profit organization, self-styled as a promoter of wildlife conservation ‘through the power of wildlife imagery’. Wildscreen was created in 1987 under the joint impulsion of Christopher Parsons, then a former head of the BBC Natural History Unit (NHU), and Sir Peter Scott, founder of the WWF, and a highly visible figure of the British culture of amateur natural history. Wildscreen is best known for its natural history film festival, held every other year in Bristol, a city dubbed ‘the green Hollywood’ in reference to its high concentration in natural history film-making facilities and production companies (most notably the BBC NHU). There is a strong sense that ARKive participates in a wider project of promoting a specific vision of natural history film-making, centered on its development as a fully fledged mode of participation in the scientific endeavor in the bosom of the NHU (most of the footage available on ARKive are credited to this institution). In this view, the association built through ARKive between wildlife conservation and natural history film-making appears as an opportunistic way of ascribing by means of the former social utility and moral desirability to the latter, thus endowing it with cognitive legitimacy. Presented as a collection of ‘the very best films and photographs of the world’s species [gathered in] one centralized digital library’, ARKive is intended ‘to create a unique audio-visual record of life on Earth’, to preserve and maintain it for future generations. The films are described as ‘important historical and scientific records of the species they depict’, suitable for scientific practitioners and nonscientists alike as empirical records of the truth of nature. This promotional discourse, and the overall organization of the database, render implicit the belief that natural history film-making is not mere popularization of the life sciences but is in itself a practice of production of genuine knowledge of the natural world; and that film-makers should be regarded as reliable participants in the knowledgegenerating enterprise called science. In this respect, it seems significant that several persons involved in
the making of ARKive should hold university degrees – ranging from the bachelor degree to the PhD – in zoology or the other life sciences. If one sets aside the question of the epistemic validity of the database’s content, and focuses on the kind of knowledge it contains as well as the strategies of its cognitive legitimization, ARKive becomes a brightly colored illustration of the fecundity of recognizing the porosity – to say the least – of the distinction between popular science and its more serious – some would say genuine – counterpart. In particular, it allows one to focus on the use of knowledge exemplified by the database, and to access its social dimension, which, otherwise, would be lost. In this context, the recourse to the most up-to-date version of the Internet, Web 2.0, is significant. For example, users can create their own ARKive and assemble a personalized portfolio using the photos and videos found in the database. This scrapbook, accessible on ‘My ARKive’, can then be shared with other users. Similarly, it is possible to submit visual material for inclusion in the database, via a group on the photo and video sharing Web facility Flickr.com. Users are here asked to use specific tags to describe their visual material so as to facilitate its inclusion in the database. The main feature of Web 2.0 is to encourage the development of a culture of participation, a consequence of which is to erase the distinction between knowledge-producers and knowledge-consumers (Beer and Burrows, 2007). ARKive can therefore be seen as resulting from the creative recycling of an age-old strategy, as old as the so-called genre of popular science, the use of a public forum and the direct appeal to the audience in order to get problematic claims to knowledge ratified.
A Web Archive of Natural History Footage The website ARKive.org exhibits two interesting aspects. First, it substitutes the static paradigm of conservation to the dynamic one of evolution as the principle allowing us to make sense of the natural world. Second, it is promoted as an archive of the multiple forms of life to be found on the planet at the end of the twentieth century. In this website, the otherwise incessantly changing phenomenon of life on earth is frozen at a given historical moment, and set as the reference point for the yet to be known natural history of an uncertain, and seemingly
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post-catastrophic future. It appears meaningful in this context that ARKive should be assembled around natural history film-making, a practice based on motion picture cinematography, a technology precisely celebrated for its ability to capture fragments of time.
References Beer, D. and Burrows, R. (2007) Sociology and, of and in Web 2.0: Some initial considerations.
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Sociological Research Online 12(5), http:// www.socresonline.org.uk/12/5/17.html. Pandey, D.N. (2003) Cultural resources for conservation science. Conservation Biology 17: 633–635. Robertson, D.P. and Hull, R.B. (2001) Beyond biology: Toward a more public ecology for conservation. Conservation Biology 15: 970–979. Yearley, S. (2008) Environmental action groups and other NGOs as communicators of science. In: M. Bucchi and B. Trench (eds.) Handbook of Public Communication of Science and Technology. Abingdon, New York: Routledge, pp. 159–171.
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