Toward a Hermeneutics of Data

Recently I watched an all women panel on careers in data science hosted by the University of California, Berkeley’s iSchool.¹ The panel members had a range of backgrounds and training, from advertising to educational research, statistics, and topic modeling. Some of the roundtable’s experts had PhDs, and a few had MBAs. Each of the panelists worked at Bay Area startups and commerce sites in northern California (think Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Jawbone). These corporate data scientists represent a promising—and fast paced—new field of commerce, analytics, knowledge, and perhaps most importantly, technical change in the present world of networked computing. I was struck by the variety of different ways these information professionals approached the idea of “data” as they were speaking about the nature of their work. The engaging discussion on data science illustrated how data is not just a byproduct of computing technologies but an engine for dynamic change that drives society in different, fascinating directions.

Data science is the systematic process of creating, building, and organizing knowledge with data. It has recently become a “new” area of interest in computing sciences, bioinformatics (including public health), learning sciences, business and marketing, and the information sciences. Higher education institutions have begun to offer master’s degrees in data science—few programs exist at the undergraduate or doctoral level, but many are soon to come.² The “newness” of data science has become all the rage of late, but for some, it’s just a fresh coat of paint. As others have taken pains to point out, the discipline of data science simply appears to consolidate and leverage principles and techniques from a number of fields that already exist, such as statistics, machine learning, knowledge management, and information retrieval.^3,4 What’s new is that data science aims to confront the massive volumes of data created and collected today. Looking closely at data now that it is big can inspire us to ask questions about how it has been handled, modified, managed, and circulated since people started leveraging data with information systems and computing machines.

New academic programs aren’t the only place where we are seeing the impact of the “data deluge.” Increasingly, we are seeing a public consciousness around personal data generation and collection by states and corporations. Data collection (telephony metadata, in particular) has come under intense, international political debate since the Snowden leaks in 2013. Earlier this spring, the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the bulk collection of telephony metadata by the US National Security Agency (NSA) is not authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act, saying that the collection “exceeds the scope of what Congress has authorized.”⁵ Since the Snowden leaks, media coverage, online activism, and political pressure from around the world brought the normally banal term “metadata” to center stage despite the fact the collection of data about citizens is far from a recent development in surveillance states.

Consumers are increasingly aware that the online traces they create generate data that can be aggregated and turned into black gold. We’re also seeing consumer backlash against the aggregation, collection, and data protection that has resulted in numerous security breaches to information systems that regularly put consumers, workers, and citizens at risk. Ethnographers, legal theorists, and communication scholars have suggested that new cryptocurrencies and data-obfuscation techniques in email encryption^6,7 have, in part, stemmed from this new consumer consciousness about how user data is aggregated and applied into new commercial products. From Home Depot and Target to the Office of Personnel Management hacks, social media users and ordinary citizens are facing security breaches that increasingly reveal the staggering amount of information that is collected through networked infrastructures about their behavior, preferences, relationships, and activities. Although citizens’ concerns about data collection have existed for many decades,⁸ and metadata and surveillance programs that leverage data into commercial applications and state governance are not new issues, I’m interested in asking how historians of computing are confronting new conceptions of data that circulate in society—in academic, commercial, and civic spheres—and what we might have to contribute...