Data before the Fact - "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron - page 3

patterns with no trouble. But all of this was new when Priestley published his charts,
and the aggregate views they offered were regarded as an important and novel contribu-
tion to both social and natural science. Indeed, it is the Chart of Biography , not an achieve-
ment in experimental science that is named on Priestley's document of induction to
the Royal Society. Later writers such as the political economist William Playfair, who
debuted early versions of the line graph and bar chart in his 1786 Commercial and Political
Atlas , credited Priestley for his innovative work in this area, too. 3
In fact, the term “data” appears in Priestley's works many times. In his Experiments
and Observations on Different Kinds of Air , Priestley uses “data” to refer to experimental
measurements of volume. In the Evidences of Revealed Religion , Priestley notes that scrip-
ture offers us “no sufficient data” on the physical nature of Christ's resurrected body. In
his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life , Priestley writes, “ Educa-
tion is as much an art (founded, as all arts are, upon science) as husbandry, as architec-
ture, or as ship-building. In all these cases we have a practical problem proposed to us,
which must be performed by the help of data with which experience and observation
furnish us. ”

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Nor is Priestley unique in this. The term “data” appears in a wide variety of contexts
in eighteenth-century English writing. But what were these early usages? What was their
importance in the language and culture of the eighteenth century? And what was their
connection to the usages familiar today? What was data apart from modern concepts
and systems of information? What notion of data preceded and prepared the way for
our own?
All of these questions are that much more pressing since, in recent histories of science
and epistemology, including foundational works by Lorraine Daston, Mary Poovey,
Theodore Porter, and Ann Blair, the term “data” does heavy lifting yet is barely remarked
upon. 5 Consider, for example, the first lines of Mary Poovey's landmark book, A History
of the Modern Fact. “What are facts?” Poovey asks. “Are they incontrovertible data that
simply demonstrate what is true? Or are they bits of evidence marshaled to persuade
others of the theory one sets out with?” Facts may be conceived either as theory-laden
or as simple and incontrovertible, Poovey says. In the latter case, we call them “data.” 6
Of course, it would not be difficult to engage in some one-upmanship. If facts can
be deconstructed—if they can be shown to be theory-laden—surely data can be too.
But it is not clear that such a move would be useful from either a conceptual or a practi-
cal point of view. The existing historiography of the fact is strong in its own terms, and
no special harm is done by an unmarked, undeconstructed deployment of the term