32 Latency

Etymologically, latent refers to something concealed or secret. It comes from the Latin latentem (nominative latens), the present participle of latere, meaning "to lie hidden, lurk, be concealed," which is also related to the Greek lethe ("forgetfulness, oblivion") and lethargos ("forgetful"). In the seventeenth century, it came to connote something "dormant, undeveloped," in the medical sense of a disease that is present but not yet producing symptoms or clinical signs. The notion of latency is thus situated in the twilight zones between visibility and invisibility, knowing and unknowing, gesturing toward something hidden from view that we expect to emerge into visibility at some point in the future. Besides prompting fundamental ontological, epistemological, and hermeneutic questions about the properties of that which is latent and how we may come to know it as such, it prompts spatial considerations (where is something hidden?) and temporal stretches of anticipation (when will it show itself?). These spatiotemporal connotations of a fluctuating field between the visible and the invisible are pertinent when we try to grasp the properties of the uncertainties that abound in big data archives, making latency, with its cross-disciplinary connotations, a particularly apt entry point for consideration of a field that by its very nature requires interdisciplinary methodologies.1