Abstract
Survey-based knowledge of marine resources has expanded greatly thanks to remote sensing and geo-locational technologies. State-sponsored and organized through state agencies, such knowledge resides in archives, dedicated databases, and online data portals where it serves to territorialize and legitimate claims to state sovereignty. Furthermore, with the power to discern and bound (e.g. stocks of commercial fish species) comes also the capacity to allocate, appropriate, and commodify. Indeed, one might read the recent attempt to coordinate such databases via a comprehensive and authoritative planning apparatus (i.e. “Marine Spatial Planning”) as a next step in the rational exploitation of marine resources. Yet the very technologies which have made this territorialization and commodification of resources possible, have also opened up other possibilities for those who, beyond the state, might leverage oceans data. For example, data portals also serve to distribute data beyond state agencies. While initiated to enhance management outcomes, they also perform, through the coordination and assemblage of disparate oceans databases, a digital ocean accessible and manipulable by increasing numbers of “stakeholders.” Leveraging such data creates new capacities and modes of territorialization decoupled from traditional forms of mapping and sovereignty. This paper explicates the ocean that is now emerging via unprecedented efforts at database coordination. It traces where and how particular ontological entities are congealing. And it suggests ways researchers might intervene on behalf of community and commons.
