Thread by @bernardionysius

A hair-splitting remark on the term "data." @RobKitchin observes in "Data revolution" that "data" should really be called "capta," to emphasise data is taken, not given (see attached text). Great point, but it risks obscuring an ethical concern 1/8 #DataStudies #MediaTheory

Kitchin's brilliant parsing is adapted to founding a particular critical and empirical field of data studies, around the oceans of data all around us. If you want a really robust entry to critical data studies, you can't do better. Yet data as "given" offers its own insights 2/

My point of departure is Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, whose accounts of gift (don) develop against the backdrop of data (donées) increasingly common in 20th c. anthropology and technocracy; their key works make this comparison explicit (MM's The Gift; CLS's Savage Mind) 3/

For them, Western science & technocracy errs in thinkings its findings are "abstract" nor "taken" in Kitchin's sense; data is a concrete token of social, epistemic, and political structures, a medium actualising concrete social relations; gifts & data realise social structure 4/

CLS and MM are debunking science as geniuses making discoveries; critiquing Bacon's account of experiment as wresting facts from nature; rejecting science as disinterested truth-finding; for CLS and MM "data" not only show or record; they equally affirm & define social rel'ns 5/

To call it "data," then, underscores given-ness, highlighting *not* how nature gives to us, but rather how our social arrangements yield meaningful tokens of evidence, action, exchange, reality, of which data (along with money) are among our most actionable exemplars today 6/

The word "data," then, affirms these ethical & social ties; it recalls this dimension of exchange, of "data as media" existing in and through social exchange that--far more than digital devices or researchers--"give" the data as tokens, and orient our own work as scholars 7/

Kitchin's point is great & valid too, just different. (FWIW it's worth, my thesis of data as gift is the subtext of my essay "Nine Pails of Ashes: Social Networks, Genocide, and the Structuralists’ Database of Language" here bit.ly/3CfVFzW ) 8/8

(Anyone want footnotes: If so, @npseaver points out @KadijaFerryman wrote an exquisitely Maussian paper on Data as Gift: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… 9/

@digital_objects invoked Mauss in his book on Digital Objects to ask "If data are the ‘things’ given, then what is it that gives data?”; and @NThylstrup & Zeerak Waseem's Mary Douglas-elaborated "Detecting “dirt” and “toxicity" elaborates a Mauss-friendly data studies 10/

& I'm riffing on 1950s-60s writings of Gurvitch, Touraine, Lefebvre in Cahiers internationaux de sociologies, & later Bourdieu, who leaned into Mauss to explain why atomistic models of data in US social science of the period embodied individualistic, imperializing ideology 11)