From Hot Mess To Usable Data: Rehabilitating Entomological Data From The Early 1900s

Often archives are our best hope for reusing irreplaceable data from historic research, but how do we go from jumbled paper records to a format scientists can actually use? With a heck of a lot of work, that’s how. This presentation describes how two archivists and a data librarian teamed up to illuminate the work of Charles Robertson, a botanist turned entomologist from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who produced one of the most in-depth pollinator studies ever conducted. Robertson’s work provides essential baseline data for contemporary research, but his publications lack the level of methodological detail required today. Valuable contextual details were buried in his archived correspondence, but making those records scientifically useful required a lot more than digitization. We also deciphered handwriting, identified correspondents, investigated outdated species names, and traced the insect specimens Robertson exchanged with his network of collaborators. Although we started by looking for data in Robertson’s correspondence, we ended up with more of a collections-as-data approach and created a dataset about the network of scientists represented in his correspondence. The resulting dataset can be used as data to analyze Robertson’s correspondence or as a discovery tool to help researchers pinpoint the digitized records of most interest to them. This case study provides a window into the puzzling, unpredictable, and rewarding process of historical data rescue with lessons learned about spinning straw into gold.