Accustomed though we are to films, files, moving-image apparatus, and books, media scholars often still find the concept of “data” jarring. As evidenced by any number of scenes of what might be called data montage—think of the reference library sleuthing in Spotlight (2015) or the now-iconic scrolling green type in The Matrix (1999)—we struggle to picture data, let alone begin to analyze it as a media object. Even in information studies and data science, fields in which data is a primary object of study, specific definitions of the term are contested and often unsatisfying. Does information become data when it is converted from undifferentiated content to structured form? When it is translated from text or image into machine-readable form? Or when marshalled as evidence or proof of results?
The information scholar Christine Borgman has argued for the contingent and time-based nature of data: information becomes data not by virtue of...
University of California Press