Paper short abstract:

Both advocates and detractors consider data as powerful entities. Beyond such obviousness, the history of the emergence of data in organizations and the ethnography of data work foreground the richness of such work, the conditions of its invisibilization, and the fragility of data enactments.

Paper long abstract:

Advocates and detractors of big or open data projects generally share the very idea that data are steady and powerful entities. Wether described as a new oil the circulation of which will improve transparency and innovation, something that pours in like rain and changes the way science and politics are made, or a technology of governance that performs unquestioned realities and reifies new inequities, data seem to be defined in a same positivist, or realist, ontology in which their very existence is taken for granted, and their agentivity is assumed as the result of intrinsic properties. In this communication, I propose to question such obviousness and highlight the ecology of visible and invisible work (Star & Strauss, 1999) it performs. I will first show that the earliest investments in standardized information and the emergence of data as a valuable resource within organizations (Beniger, 1986; Yates, 1989; Agar, 2003; Gardey, 2008) are tightly linked to the mechanization and the invisibilization of information work. I will then draw on two ethnographic studies (in the back office of a bank, and a start-up that works with French administrations) to explore some aspects of today's data work and the conditions of its invisibilization. This will allow to foreground the fragile and uncertain process through which very different — sometimes undefined — things progressively and temporarily become data.