Being with Data. Nathaniel Tkacz

‘values’ and ‘behaviours’.⁵⁰ As a ‘way of life’ Williams understood culture as ordinary and lived. When I say this is a book about culture, it is because I am interested in exploring the ordinary, lived experience of dashboards. I am interested in how they alter how we act, how we perceive and relate to things and each other; how dashboards tend towards a certain ‘habit of the mind’ (to use another definition offered by Williams). And, like Williams, I am interested in this relationship between the ‘ideal’ – or what I prefer to think of more basically as things that persist over time – and the ‘lived’ that always negotiates new settlements with these persistent things.

      Through their arrangements, displays and processing of data, dashboards produce regularities, routines and habits; dashboards work upon us on this level of lived experience; an altered style of thought or epistemological ratio; a new factor to include among established coordinates; a subtle change in the general atmosphere; a feeling. Dashboards carry along in their format traces of longer cultural legacies, traces which present as tendencies towards specific ways of being. Paraphrasing Latour, a dashboard is culture made durable; it is how certain ways of being persist.⁵¹ The challenge, if I may call it that, is to bring forth this cultural specificity, to offer an elaboration of it, and to make visible things that aren’t exactly hidden but may have been overlooked precisely because they are right in front of us, because we use them to see with, or because we have been swept up in competing understandings about how data are transforming our societies.

The development of the dashboard criss-crosses different cultures; it passes through them or settles in; it brings cultures together, while preventing other cultural ties from being forged. As we shall see, it partakes in horse-and-carriage cultures, car cultures, accounting-and-management cultures and more – with each leaving its mark on the format, each adding something to the format’s ways of being. Acknowledging this expansive and open-ended approach to culture, I propose to stick closely to the format. This will not be a study of culture in general, but the study of a format as it moves across time-spaces, carrying along ways of being and encountering others. The specificity of the encounter is a matter of formatting.

Overview

      How will this series of investigations proceed? Often, I begin with a dashboard. For social science readers, this can be considered a grounding move. Dashboards will ground my words as they weave and loop through different times and places, acting as a centrifugal force. Sometimes the focus will be on dashboards themselves; at other times I will swirl around them, moving from format to the events that shape its arrangements, or to the contexts and situations that undergo formatting.

As this is a format that travels across times and spaces, through diverse settings and different medial configurations, there are many possible ways to initiate a dashboard-driven inquiry. For example, a dashboard may be realized through software; through numbers, colours and visualizations; through interfaces; and as part of larger systems. Dashboards are also used for specific things and exist in specific contexts (web analytics, fitness, city councils and so on). Each of the different components or features of a dashboard contains at least one related field of inquiry: software studies, the anthropology of numbers, studies of visual perception (cognitive science) and data visualization, human–computer interaction and user experience design, infrastructure studies, organization studies and so on. And each of these could easily be substituted with others, depending on the nature of the inquiry. For example, one could replace infrastructure studies with information systems, steering the inquiry more towards the practical requirements of business. My approach will be to traverse these terrains as a (mostly friendly) trespasser, pulling threads together as needed. It should not be mistaken for an arbitrary approach, however – not an interdisciplinary willy-nilly. I will attempt to stick close to and ‘follow the dashboard’, not in the same way the early multi-sited ethnographers employed a ‘follow the thing’⁵² methodology to track commodities (and other things) around the world in order to weave a tale about globalization or the logistics of capitalism. Instead, I follow the dashboard by picking up selected moments of its past or present that highlight significant aspects of it as a format. In these moments, I come into contact with different forms of expertise and practice, with some corresponding to disciplinary knowing and the coordinates of others more difficult to establish.

      Along the way, I engage with the earliest motor cars; the horse and carriage; French industrial accounting and management; the field of decision support systems; business intelligence and analytics; the management of hospitals; commercial dashboard providers; situation rooms; many different types of data; and, of course, a Saturday morning jog. I draw upon equally diverse bodies of research, knowing well that I cannot hope to master all this terrain, or to contribute novel insights to experts in each respective area. I hope bringing them together allows me to say something worthwhile about how data formats are producing new ways of being and how we might study them.

      The main part of the book is divided into three chapters. The first chapter, ‘Archaeology of Dashboards’, offers what I call a ‘format archaeology’. This sets the study apart from other historically minded research on the topic of data, which have tended to focus on numbers, statistics, facts and related methods, or on broader epistemological themes, such as Ian Hacking’s fascinating studies of chance and probability.⁵³ Indeed, for much of the first part of this study data are not in the picture at all or are only minor characters. What I aim to understand is the development of the dashboard as a format. Where do dashboards come from? How have they changed over time? What persists? What ways of relating to the world do they encourage? What cultural mythologies are they caught up in? And what forms of subjectivity do they foster?

There are many possible moments one could pull from the archive. I’ve tried to focus on ones that I think offer the most food for thought in the present because they say the most about how dashboards (and dashboard data) came to be, ways that I think could be overlooked if one were to focus only on the most famous historical moments. For example, whereas I could have focused on the well-known US military project SAGE (the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) and positioned dashboards more strongly within a military context, I have instead focused on the lesser-known work of people such as Michael Scott Morton. His early research with Westinghouse was not on the scale of SAGE, but he was the first to propose something like a ‘dashboard relation’, an interactive data display for making decisions within a management context. His work would help establish the field of decision support systems (DSS) and today’s business dashboards can be traced more or less directly back to his early experiments. Thus, Scott Morton receives the lion’s share of my attention, whereas other well-known projects like SAGE, LEO or even Cybersyn are mostly left aside.⁵⁴

      Beginning with the horse and carriage, the format archaeology moves to consider the motor car, pre-digital French managerial dashboards, the rise of DSS and related executive support systems and executive information systems, before ending with a discussion of business intelligence and the proliferation of dashboard analytics. Through this material, I am interested not only in how dashboards have changed over time and in different contexts, but also in what holds them together. Without elaborating too much, I argue that dashboards always facilitate an originary separation, a separation which the dashboard also bridges through its specific mediations. Dashboards also imply and rely upon a sense of motion. They exist in situations understood to be in motion and they in turn produce a sense of motion as part of their formatting. Through this separation and motion, dashboards encourage distinct forms of perception or ways of seeing data, which I refer to as driverly perception. Finally, dashboards configure the cognitive activity of their users as one relating to decision-making. The user of dashboards is a decision-maker and the context or setting they are in is recast around the dynamics of decision-making. I refer to this formatting work through the notion of a decision ontology.

The remainder of the book has a contemporary focus, moving from what ‘persists’ to ‘lived experience’, drawing on two main case studies. I arrived at these by taking advantage of opportunities as they came over a period of roughly six years. Over this time, I interviewed or informally discussed