Being with Data. Nathaniel Tkacz

namely modern facts.⁴⁰ Well before Poovey’s epistemologically orientated inquiry, however, many others had similarly argued for the significance of DEB vis-à-vis the broad trajectory of modern society. Max Weber identified DEB as a key stage in the development of modern rationalization and a necessary ingredient of capitalism. Joseph Schumpeter and Werner Sombart agreed with Weber on DEB’s rationalizing function and its importance for modern capitalism. Out of the three, Sombart in particular accorded DEB the highest significance, declaring that ‘capitalism and double entry bookkeeping are absolutely indissociable; their relationship to each other is that of form to content’.⁴¹ In a passage that reads like a precursor of German media theory, Sombart adds the following regarding the notion of capital: ‘The very concept of capital is derived from this way of looking at things; one can say that capital, as a category, did not exist before double-entry bookkeeping.’⁴² Since these Germanic reflections on DEB, more weight has been given to its theological and rhetorical role as opposed to its assumed rational and technical superiority, though its significance as system, practice and indeed format is not disputed.⁴³

      If Poovey considered the modern fact as the dominant epistemological unit for the period of modernity, besides playing a crucial role in this history, the influence of DEB extends well beyond Poovey’s concerns, underpinning centuries of commerce while also providing a moral basis (through its rhetorical function) for commercial activity itself.⁴⁴ We can see that formats have the power to radically alter epistemological systems; not just what is considered knowledge (or not) but more fundamentally how one approaches and perceives items of epistemological significance. As Poovey shows, formats can also lay the ground for further transformations in the things that have undergone formatting, in her case the unleashing of a new potential ‘facticity’ within numbers that would ripple across early modern science. The importance others have placed on DEB in relation to rationalization and capitalism further confirms this capacity to format the social.

      I introduce DEB to help flesh out my conception of format (without anticipating the material to come) and to communicate the significance of certain formats regarding the contours of societies past and present. While it would be naive to consider DEB as only a format or number of formats, or to attribute its historical role to the work of formatting alone, it would be equally naive to underestimate the significance of arranging numbers (or code, data, text, images) time and time again and in standardized ways; ways that can travel and insinuate themselves into the routines of daily life, habituating forms of being and knowing, interpreting and perceiving.

DEB also provides an interesting contrast to the dashboard as a format. Like DEB, the dashboard has found a home in commerce and, in particular, the management of large and medium-sized organizations. As we shall see, with at least one of the historical trajectories belonging to the dashboard format, dashboards are presented as a development from mid-twentieth-century accounting, specifically in relation to the rise of ‘industrial accounting’. One finds within the dashboard format a new relation to numbers and data, one that includes not only the financial numbers typical of accounting, but also non-financial numbers and forms of representation no longer in the service of balancing the books or auditing. Like DEB, dashboards are also loaded, or layered, with epistemological and broader cultural significance. If DEB served a rhetorical function, adding legitimacy to commerce (at a time when profit on lending money or ‘usury’ was prohibited) through the production of numbers that were always ‘in balance’, the dashboard too is caught up with technological and managerial ideals. And if DEB provided ‘writing positions’ and accompanying forms of authority derived from its system, so too does the dashboard privilege certain ways of knowing and doing, certain types of organizational arrangements, and certain ways of representing data and numbers. The dashboard is no straightforward replacement of the formats of accounting and I will not speculate as to whether it will attain the historical significance of DEB. The dashboard criss-crosses with accounting in certain historical moments, but also contains within it layers from different historical trajectories and present tendencies that reach far beyond the numerical representation found in accounting ledgers. The dashboard has already been with us for over a century, slowing, stabilizing and recursively adapting to new technological configurations, absorbing the visions of its designers, engineers and the cultures which put it to work in predictable or unexpected ways. If DEB produced a form of ‘noninterpretative’ numerical representation that was able to travel and become a bedrock of modern science, it is not so much the travelling of data in dashboards that is of interest, but rather the travelling of the dashboard format itself.

      The notions of format and formatting provide the conceptual underpinning of this study of data and dashboards. They are how I hold the two together (data and dashboards) and inform many of the specific observations I will make about each. As much as this is a study of data and dashboards, it is a study of formats and the work of formatting.

Culture

      This is a book about culture. Ordinary, everyday things.⁴⁵ Saturday morning runs, consumer devices, screens, work, ways of seeing and thinking, ways of being. Things that are easily overlooked because they gradually blend into the status quo without much hoo-ha. In the case of dashboards, this book is about a thing that was once not very ordinary becoming so; and about an ordinary thing in one sphere (transportation) becoming ordinary in others. It is about culture becoming data culture and dashboard culture; about the formatting of culture and the culture of formatting.

      How does culture enter the picture? Some points of clarification are needed as there are many possible ways one might bring culture and data/dashboard/format together. Culture or cultural categories can serve as the content of data or what is represented by data, for example, as found in the research subfield of ‘cultural analytics’.⁴⁶ Much of the work that goes by the name of digital humanities also deals with things that are traditionally understood as cultural, and we could generalize to include any other studies where things deemed cultural are the focus of a data-driven inquiry. One can access and make claims about ‘culture’ through extracting data from the diversity of documents (text, images, links etc.) that characterize our digital society and populate its archives (data centres). In this sense, culture is data’s subject matter, its topic, if you will.

      In a very different way, ‘culture’ can be invoked to critique the authority of data, its presentation formats and related algorithmic processes. Here, culture might be contrasted with science, such that data-driven and algorithmic processes are found to contain cultural ‘biases’ related to gender, race, age and other markers of identity. Such perceived biases may be located in the data themselves (e.g., their categories), the methods for manipulating and displaying data, or the institutions and settings within which data are produced. When we invoke culture in this way it is often to reveal problems with data that have not been seen or addressed by those who work with data. There are now many excellent studies that fall into this category.⁴⁷

What I am interested in, though, is not culture as topic or culture as bias or counterpoint to a presumed scienticity. I am not hoping to discover some hidden elements, a cultural ‘Where’s Wally?’⁴⁸ among an otherwise technical and scientific mise en scène. And I am not interested in creating a strong contrast between science and culture. The tradition of science and technology studies has taught us to tread carefully with these matters. Rather, and taking my cue from this tradition, I want to treat data and dashboards as culture. A dashboard doesn’t merely contain cultural elements, display cultural data or exist in cultural situations. It is always already a cultural entity. No further ingredients are required; no discoveries of bias, no contrast to science. A dashboard facilitates ways of being – with data, as we have seen – and ways of thinking, alongside ways of relating to time, space and other people and things. It always already partakes in and contributes to certain ways of living. This understanding of dashboards (as everyday/ordinary and facilitating ways of being) resembles something of Raymond Williams’ approach to culture precisely as ‘a whole way of life’.⁴⁹ Williams’ account of culture is multifaceted and I can’t do it justice here, but it includes traditions passed down and understood as ‘ideals’, works of expressive creativity (‘intellectual and imaginative