Over the past thirty years, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists have all explored the question of how quantification and its underlying reasoning have shaped societies in the last two centuries.These studies cover many different forms of quantification and their applications, but share one common feature: their authors do not consider statistics as arising in a vacuum, automatically representative of a given natural or social phenomenon; rather, creating statistics involves intense work and conflicting visions among stakeholders, including between researchers and administrators. This same basic premise is also being applied in an emerging body of literature devoted to the study of data. Such studies came to prominence along with the rise of “Big Data”—a term usually used to describe the increasingly vast capacity for data accumulation and calculation that has had a deep impact on both scientific research and our everyday lives.
