Paper short abstract:

"Domain" is a keyword in contemporary data science ventures and a long standing keyword for the computing and information sciences. "Domain" serves to identify and bound a target for prospecting (or farming), and serves to organize relations between expert participants.

Paper long abstract:

Farming data is today's tip of the historical iceberg in efforts to prospect the domains. "Domain" is an actors' category in the computing, information and data sciences -- it refers to any worldly expertise, for instance, biology as the "domain science of life" or geology as the "domain science of the earth". The term "domain" serves to identify the target of efforts in the computing sciences to bring within their purview some feature of that domain: today data, but at other times, knowledge, software, workflows, ontologies and so on. This presentation will place today's efforts to farm data within a longer historical trajectory of prospecting the domains, and argue that increasingly the logic of domains has become the de facto organizing principle for today's computing sciences, encoded in the organization of data centers, in toolsets and in funding policy.