Data Journeys in the Sciences
The introduction discusses the idea of data journeys and its characteristics as an investigative tool and theoretical framework for this volume and broader scholarship on data and the significance of this approach towards addressing the challenges raised by data-centric science and the emergence of big and open data.
Abstract
(Extract from preface) What conditions are required to identify data in the first place and to make them usable as evidence? And what implications does data processing carry not just for the content of the knowledge being produced but for the extent to which that knowledge can ground interventions in the world and inform political, scientific, social, economic debate? The contributions to this volume help readers to ponder these questions by guiding them into the thick web of entanglements involved in making data move across time, space and social context. Readers are asked to accompany data in their journeys from their material origin through human interactions with the world (which range from the collection of objects to the generation of traces and measurements)to their dissemination across various forms of aggregation (datasets, data series,indicators) and vehicles (databases, publications, archives) and ultimately to their \nuse as evidence for claims. During these journeys, data experience many different types of encounters – with other data, diverse groups of users, specific infrastructures and technologies and political, economic and cultural expectations – which affect and shape the data themselves and their prospective usability. Far from underestimating the politics and power of data, which so many contributors to the emerging field of critical data studies have so effectively highlighted, we seek to document how such politics is embedded, reified and/or revised in the technical and epistemic work that structures everyday research practices. Delving into stories of how data \ntravel involves seeing data as entities that can, and often do, change their properties in response to their environment and relations – and whose travels are often choreographed and regulated to achieve a variety of (sometimes incompatible) goals. What comes to be seen as datum at any one point in time is itself the result of a journey; \nand far from being linear and well-organized, the journey is often full of detours and unpredictable changes, largely due to the diverse and complex social networks and contexts responsible for making data move.