Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
150,000
112, 500
75,000
37,500
0
“data”
“fact”
“evidence”
“truth”
Figure 1.9
Works in the ECCO I corpus containing “ data, ” “ fact, ” “ truth, ” and “ evidence, ” 1701 - 1800.
not only to count for frequencies but also to examine each usage in context and to code
each for semantic characteristics. The first and most pervasive problem that has turned
up in this work is that a majority of usages of “data,” even in the English language books
in the database, turn out to be Latin. Often the Latin word
data
appears in quotations,
footnotes, or conventional phrases such as
data desuper
(given from above) included in
longer English texts. Other hits refer to the title of Euclid's book
Data
. Still others turn
out to be scanning errors. In one instance, the search engine pulled up a reference to
a certain King Data, a giant who fattened his twenty-five children by feeding them on
puddings stuffed with enchanted herbs.
26
As a consequence it has been useful to examine
hits individually, to sort the good from the bad and to code them, to engage in the
constructive process of data making so well described in recent ethnographies of sci-
entific practice. My own data may once have been raw, but by the time I began any
serious interpretation, I had cooked it quite well.
Getting an accurate count for “data” has been a challenge. The process of scrutinizing
each hit and eliminating those that were not English-language common nouns shrank
the pool of viable instances. In fact, it certainly shrank the total number too far. Many
works identified by ECCO as containing the word “data” in fact contain more instances
