Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
1
Data before the Fact
Daniel Rosenberg
I
s data modern? The answer depends on what one means by “data” and what one means
by “modern.” The concept of data specific to electronic computing is evidently an arti-
fact of the twentieth century, but the ideas underlying it and the use of the term are
much older. In English, “data” was first used in the seventeenth century. Yet it is not
wrong to associate the emergence of the concept and that of modernity. The rise of the
concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is tightly linked to the development
of modern concepts of knowledge and argumentation. And, though these concepts long
predate twentieth-century innovations in information technology, they played a crucial
role in opening the conceptual space for that technology. The aim of this chapter is to
sketch the early history of the concept of “data” in order to understand the way in which
that space was formed.
My point of departure for this project is a happenstance textual encounter that
eventually became a kind of irritation: in reading the 1788
Lectures on History and General
Policy
by the polymath natural philosopher and theologian Joseph Priestley, I stumbled
on a passage in which Priestley refers to the facts of history as “data.”
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In the text, his
meaning is clear enough, but the usage surprised me. I had previously associated the
notion of data with the bureaucratic and statistical revolutions of the nineteenth century
and the technological revolutions of the twentieth. And while I don't begrudge Priestley
his use of the term, it seemed very early.
Of course, if one were to pick an eighteenth-century figure likely to be interested
in data, Priestley is about as good a choice as one might make. After all, Priestley was
an early innovator in the field we now call data graphics. His 1765
Chart of Biography
is
a great achievement in this field, an engraved double-folio diagram displaying the lives
of about two thousand famous historical figures on a measured grid.
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It was one of the
earliest works to employ the conventions of linearity and regularity now common in
