muller2023shipmap
Ship-map bycatch: Research discards and their potentials
By-catch. A noun. British English. “Unwanted fish and other
sea animals caught in a fishing net along with the desired kind
of fish.”
Bycatch. Scientific definition. “Bycatch refers most often to
those species incidentally taken in fishing operations aimed at
other (target) species... [it] refers to species accidentally caught
other than the target species, brought on board, dead or alive,
and that can therefore be either released alive, discarded dead,
or landed.”
What happens when you spin a net out into a sea of data? What is returned?
What is valuable (what is not)? What is by-catch (or bycatch)? What is unwanted,
alongside that which is wanted? What is unintentional, caught by accident?
And what should be discarded (or thrown back into the metaphorical
waters)? What is kept? Landed. Why?
Figure 1: Density of ship position reports. These traces of ship locations create a new perspective, the ocean is not defined by the absence of land, rather land is defined by the absence of ships.