For our daily lives, having a strong concept of what data are is probably not necessary. If your mobile phone, spreadsheet and social media work, what’s the problem? But it’s helpful to have an analytical framework for thinking data when asking more pressing questions: who controls data, who owns data, what is the value of data, and so on.
This philosophical definition of spain rcs data data (which is probably a bad name) is what I’m going to talk about in this post.
web of data
Image: a web of data
The Non-Neutrality Principle
A good question to begin with is not the question “what are data?” but instead:
are information and data the same thing?
For several authors, the answer to this question is no.
In their essay series Raw Data is an Oxymoron, media historian Lisa Gitelman argues that information only becomes data when it is conceived and recorded as such.
From this perspective, we might imagine information existing everywhere all the time, waiting for someone to capture it that it might become data. What’s more, choice is of vital importance; as Gitelman writes, raw data is an oxymoron. There is always some choice as to what to measure and what not to measure, and thus data carries some human bias and exists for some purpose or intention.
Legal scholar Teresa Scassa has called this idea the non-neutrality principle.