Raw Data Is an Oxymoron

Episodes in the history of data, from early modern math problems to today''s inescapable “dataveillance,” that demonstrate the dependence of data on culture.

We live in the era of Big Data, with storage and transmission capacity measured not just in terabytes but in petabytes (where peta- denotes a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion). Data collection is constant and even insidious, with every clic...