Toward a Hermeneutics of Data

Data science is the systematic process of creating, building, and organizing knowledge with data. A piece of data without context is without meaning, but when data is put into context it becomes meaningful information to people and machines, and it may acquire more contextual information over time. Data's impact on society and studies of data have reached a point for which it is now time for historians of computing to historicize data directly. In fact, computing historians are uniquely positioned to probe the entanglement of networked infrastructures, data, and cultures of computing in the recent past and near future.