This post asks some of the hard questions about data, drawing on INM's recent campaign. The videos it features are beautiful and provoking; do watch them. But watch them critically, as advised here. "In these commercials data is first and foremost material. It is a physical stuff," writes Mitchell Whitelaw. Why is that important? "It just exists.. there is no visible sign of this data being gathered (or rather, made)." But the metaphor is seductively wrong, he writes. "Data depends on stuff; always in it, and moving transmaterially through it, but it is precisely not stuff in itself." And "Data does not just happen... it is gathered by people, for specific reasons, with a certain view of the world in mind, a certain concept of what the problem or the subject is." As he says, "Data is not inherent or intrinsic in anything: it is constructed, and if we are going to work intelligently with data we must remember that it can always be constructed some other way." Sound advice, and well-supported by the, um, data.
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