"Raw data" is an oxymoron
By: edited by Lisa Gitelman
Series: Infrastructures series
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9780262518284
Subjects: Information theory; Data warehousing; Databases; Data transmission systems
Description: We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every click and every "like" stored somewhere for something. This book reminds us that data is anything but "raw," that we shouldn't think of data as a natural resource but as a cultural one that needs to be generated, protected, and interpreted. The book's essays describe eight episodes in the history of data from the predigital to the digital. Together they address such issues as the ways that different kinds of data and different domains of inquiry are mutually defining; how data are variously "cooked" in the processes of their collection and use; and conflicts over what can -- or can't -- be "reduced" to data. Contributors discuss the intellectual history of data as a concept; describe early financial modeling and some unusual sources for astronomical data; discover the prehistory of the database in newspaper clippings and index cards; and consider contemporary "dataveillance" of our online habits as well as the complexity of scientific data curation.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Data before the fact / Daniel Rosenberg; title: Procrustean Marxism and subjective rigor : early modern arithmetic and its readers / Travis D. Williams; title: From measuring desire to quantifying expectations : a late nineteenth-century effort to marry economic theory and data / Kevin R. Brine and Mary Poovey; title: Where is that moon, anyway? : the problem of interpreting historical solar eclipse observations / Matthew Stanley; title: Facts and FACTS : abolitionists' database innovations / Ellen Gruber Garvey; title: Paper as passion : Niklas Luhmann and his card index / Markus Krajewski; title: Dataveillance & countervailance / Rita Raley; title: Data bite man : the work of sustaining a long-term study / David Ribes and Steven J. Jackson.