Paper short abstract:

Using the Data Documentation Initiative as a case study, this paper explores how data archiving classification systems and standards are (re)making data, and the social sciences more generally, in historically- and culturally-specific ways.

Paper long abstract:

Over the past two decades the archiving of research data within the social and the natural sciences has increasingly become subject to regulation. Research funding organizations, Universities, and academic journals are institutionalizing data archiving as a normative practice while many data archives are implementing standardized classification systems for archiving and sharing data. One example is the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) international metadata standard for statistical and social science data. DDI comprises DDI-Codebook used for describing data at the archiving stage of the research process, and DDI-Lifecycle which conceptualizes the entire research lifecycle in terms of data conceptualization, collection, processing, distribution, discovery, analysis, repurposing, and archiving. DDI constitutes itself as a neutral and passive classification system, which enables comprehensive description of data for discovery and analysis, and allows effective data sharing. Drawing on STS literature which challenges both the taken for granted-ness, and assumed innocence, of classification systems (Foucault, 1970; Derrida, 1994; Ritvo, 1997; Bowker & Star, 1999; Waterton, 2002; Bowker, 2005; Sommerlund, 2006), our paper approaches the DDI as an object of study in order to explore how DDI embeds and enacts a historically- and culturally-specific conception of the nature of 'data', and social science more generally. Following Barad (2007) and Derrida (1994), and building on our existing work in this area (Mauthner and Gardos, 2015, Mauthner, 2016), we further investigate how the DDI materializes power through a dual process of embodying a specific conceptualization of data (and social science), and naturalizing this 'privileged topology' (Derrida 1994: 3).