"Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron

by Lisa Gitelman (Editor)

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.

Essay authors: Geoffrey C. Bowker, Kevin R. Brine, Ellen Gruber Garvey, Lisa Gitelman, Steven J. Jackson, Virginia Jackson, Markus Krajewski, Mary Poovey, Rita Raley, David Ribes, Daniel Rosenberg, Matthew Stanley, Travis D. Williams

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, History, Science, Academic, Anthropology, Ebooks

203 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 11, 2013

About the author

Lisa Gitelman is Professor of English and of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era and the editor of "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron and New Media, 1740–1915.

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must-read for anyone interested in data or data science. The chapter on the use of data in the anti-Slavery movement is brilliant.

The premise of the book is that data isn't something that's abstract, out there, and value-neutral. Data only exists when it's collected, and collecting data is a human activity. And in turn, the act of collecting and analyzing data changes (one could even say "interprets") us.

This book is an anthology, so the chapters aren't equally strong. But it's essential reading.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Key chapters on an abolitionist database of newspaper ads; dataveillance; and ethnography of data collection in a project to study urban streams. Quaint (for 2018 relative to 2013) explanations of what petabytes and terabytes are.

[Kelsey Breseman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Varied quality among the essays. The photo inserts with captions were by far the most compelling part, would recommend that to anyone

[Dani Arribas-bel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three out of five stars for this book is probably the best irony that can justify reading it for, by being a collection of essays, some clearly deserve the five stars while some would be rated much lower. By bringing this qualitative approach to the understanding of something as quantitative as data, Lisa Gitelman forces us to think beyond the data average that distorts the more complicated reality and, that in itself, is reason enough to pick up and start reading.

As a quantitative-minded scientist, reading such a qualitative text has constantly had me on the verge of fascination and boredom. Clearly there's much variation across chapters and while some are among the best sleep-inducer I've tried in a long time, others are fascinating historic accounts, like the story about abolitionists and data from newspapers, or just plain fun, like the one about eclipses and the distance to the moon. Whichever is your take, this book is a good collection of places where to start thinking about one of the most present aspects of the current world.

[Josephine Ensign · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best title and cover design I have come across it quite some time. My two favorite chapters in this fascinating collection are "'facts and FACTS': Abolitionists' Database Innovations" by Ellen Gruber Garvey and "Dataveillance and Countervailance" by Rita Raley. Highly recommended.

[Magdalena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eclectic collection of essays on "data" more broadly construed than your average "data" book, with a lot of scaffolding for folks who aren't in so deep in the guts of STS. This makes it still useful after 8 years, even as the associated fields have moved at breakneck speeds. Loved it, keeping it.

[Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before you crunch any data, you should read this book.