In 2008, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired magazine, argued on his blog (‘Better than free’: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php ) that the web had fundamentally changed what would count as valuable in the future. Since the Internet is very good and making and proliferating copies of information (“The Internet is a copy machine.”), copies become more or less worthless: information becomes free. According to Kelly, what remains valuable is that which cannot be copied: immediacy of access, personalization of data, interpretation of information, authenticated information. Although Kelly was writing about economic value, the notion of the Internet as a giant copy machine has consequences for knowledge too. In the world of Big Data, what counts as valuable will be highly accessible, readily searchable, and easily interpretable.

This paper will draw on interviews and fieldwork at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The EBI’s Ensembl database will be used to explore how data is manipulated and ordered in order to become valuable for biological work. The Ensembl team itself conducts no experiments, produces no raw data. Yet its work is highly valued by biologists because of its contribution to organizing data. The particular ways in which Ensembl structures and organizes information are considered to be its trademark and its greatest asset.

Much of the bioinformatic labor that constitutes Ensembl is the appropriate movement of data in virtual space. It is through the motion and organization of data in virtual space data becomes valuable. A disordered or haphazardly organized space would be of no value because it would reveal nothing about biology. Thus the way data is moved around in space and the way it is arrayed in space determines its epistemological status – data that is appropriately ordered in virtual space can attain value.

Kelly’s insights can help us to understand these new regimes of value surrounding data in biological work. The process through which information becomes authenticated knowledge is being transformed by the very fact that a vast amount of data is so cheaply and easily circulated. The careful management of virtual space creates ordered, searchable, accessible, reliable, and interpretable information. In other words, this organization of data in space provides a means through which data can become knowledge.