Concept: Data
Definition: (noun) facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis
Related Terms: data flows, data infrastructure, surveillance, algorithms, big data
Description: The term data has become ubiquitous today, the fundamental component of a computerized, information-driven global society. Around it, a constellation keeps growing: datafication, big data, large language models, machine learning, data capitalism, and more. While the practice of data-gathering and data analysis has been at the heart of the natural sciences since their dawn, and also informs research practices in anthropology, sociology, archaeology, and many other disciplines, what we are encountering in the digital era is something more enlarged and pervasive. Data are being monetized in unprecedented ways. Large media corporations program software to track the viewing habits of consumers (including very young children) in order to target individuals and influence their choices. Government agencies, too, are taking advantage of the capability to amass data on private citizens, as well as to track movements across vast distances through satellites and other surveillance equipment.
The concept of data as a “scientific approach” to human differences gained momentum in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and has a fraught and often racist history. It is linked to then-popular ideologies of eugenics, craniology, phrenology and involved the measurements of the skulls and bodily characteristics of colonial subjects and particularly, native or local populations in Australia, India, and other countries. These have evolved in the 20th and 21st centuries to photographic and biometric measures for identification of citizens and non-citizens at airports and borders. Media scholar Lily Cho (2017) describes the Chinese government’s large-scale collection of personal data of those who move across the mainland and Hong Kong, and the intricate politics of home and citizenship that it characterizes. Such border-crossing protocols are increasingly evident in many other regions of the world.
The emergence of “critical data studies” seeks to address the dual nature of big data and its impact. On the one hand, there is the chance to detect diseases and make bio-medical breakthroughs because of large bodies of data that were previously not possible to compile or analyze with sophisticated digital tools. On the other hand, humans are fast becoming data-generating entities for the benefit of rich and powerful societal players. The future is unclear and it is unfolding.
S.C. 2024
Further Readings:
Pangrazio, Luci and Neil Selwyn. Critical Data Literacies: Rethinking Data and Everyday Life. MIT Press, 2023.
Hepp, Andreas, Juliane Jarke, Leif Kramp, eds. New Perspectives in Critical Data Studies: The Ambivalences of Data Power. Springer International Publishing AG, 2022.
Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT, 2006.
