Rural weather journals and fisheries logs as a representation of hybrid forms of interaction between science and local communities

Can a diary be a social chronicle and a scientific protocol at the same time? What does mixing of genres and text structures mean in this case? The article presents a diverse range of rural weather diaries written by fishermen, nurse, gardener, inspector, and museum specialist. Underlying all these documents is the idea of combining different types of data in one structure and on one page, which makes them a special type of hybrid document. The uniqueness of the situation consists in the fact that, combining data of different types (meteorological, financial, historical, biographical, and infrastructural) obtained from different sources and through different means (from temperature measurement tools to personal feelings, rumours, and the Internet), the authors of the diaries indirectly participate in the production of another type of knowledge, which is born at junctions, overlaps and parallels between phenomena and facts, assessments and sarcasm, poetic descriptions and chronicles of a natural disaster. Analysing the structure of the diaries, their language and main components, as well as the purposes for which they are kept, I reveal the nature of the processes occurring due to the very act of writing and show why the diary itself in some sense becomes a laboratory. What does this laboratory produce and can we apply to it the logic of description that Bruno Latour applies in describing the process of producing scientific articles? What happens to the text in the rural weather diary and is it in fact a text? This article attempts to answer these questions and to 'turn over' the logic of 'translation' proposed by the actor-network theory.

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