Sand lit up for grabs
Last year, the S.AND team started working on a Zotero public literary database on sand. We call this growing repository The Public Sandbox. The database mainly consists of social scientific publications on the topic of sand, but also includes entries from other disciplines, ranging from economic studies of sand mafias to hard scientific investigations of coastal protection measures and climate change adaptation (such as Vanishing Sands by Pilkey et al., see cover image).
The references are organized by world region which enables users to quickly find literature pertaining to a specific area or water body. The Public Sandbox also comprises studies on related topics, such as the global construction industry, geology, or land grabbing. In addition, non-academic publications were included to capture how literary and artistic work approaches the topic of sand. In total, the database currently contains up to 400 references - and it is constantly growing. It reflects the increasing interest in the material and emerging ways of writing about it.