Taxonomic Work as Information Work: Design for Semantic Refactoring

Taxonomy is the branch of science concerned with classi- fying organisms: drawing the line between cats and dogs, fish and fowl, animals and vegetables. Modern taxonomic work is built on a hundreds-year-old tradition of qualitative research and description. There are aspects of this work that illustrate the pervasiveness and difficulty of a particular kind of qualitative data wrangling, which we call semantic refactoring: the review, normalization, and re-engineering of semantic structures. Because taxonomic work is con- ducted over long time spans, the processes underlying se- mantic refactoring become more visible. An examination of taxonomic data practices may inform our understanding of how (and if) collections of qualitative data scale, particularly when collaboratively created.