What role do governance arrangements, background legal rules, and the core infrastructures play in enabling collection and production of oceans data, and other data and knowledge of planetary significance? We explore this by focusing on Argo – an international program of research institutions and state agencies that deploys arrays of autonomous environmental sensor-equipped floats to collect and process ocean observation data that is then made freely available to all. We analyze the techniques and practices involved in planning, testing, calibrating, validating, and error-correcting that ultimately lead to the production, transmission, and dissemination of Argo data. We position Argo within the institutional governance of oceans, weather, climate and, most recently, earth systems to illustrate both the evolution of Argo’s role and its evolving and uneasy position within different governance approaches. In the conclusion, we highlight the advantages of organic network-based open science-data infrastructural initiatives in the development of planetary knowledge and governance, and point to some of the risks and trade-offs if this were to become subsumed into wider and more formalized international data-infrastructure hierarchies.

This chapter examines the role of three kinds of narratives in producing knowledge about the rupture process of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011. I show that each of the three kinds of narratives appears in one of three stages on the way from data recorded of the earthquake to a reconstruction of the rupture process. In the first stage, rupture narratives are produced by computational tools called source models. In the second stage, a set of details that is taken accurately to represent features of the actual rupture process is distilled out of these conflicting rupture narratives through the use of a ‘research narrative’. In the third stage, these distilled details are strung together into an integrating narrative. This integrating narrative is used as a research tool for formulating questions, the pursuit of which has led to the production of further evidence about the rupture process.