Abstract

From the metropolitan laboratory up to the research station, all the scientific and technical gestures surrounding Antarctica are part of _maintenance work_. Antarctica as a place appears as an accumulation of all those small gestures (scientific and technical, but mainly ordinary) and narratives (blogs, research papers, technical documentation…). They are contributing to make Antarctica last (Denis and Pontille, 2022:11) as a place dedicated to the production of (in)valuable scientific data. This talk will be the opportunity to present an ongoing reflexion about the anthropological value(s) of Antarctica data.

Through the exposition of different field situations, this presentation will explore the relation between the scientific community and Antarctica, in the short time frame when the sample becomes a data. During this moment (event?), it will question the value(s) that scientific data holds as a proxy for Antarctica.