We live, we are often told, in the age of data. Governments, corporations, and popular discourse frequently portray data as the closest thing we have to objective reality: a neutral record of the world as it is (Day 2014). But data are not found; they are made (Borgman 2015). And the ways we make, use, and think about data today have a history.

Historians of science and STS scholars have demonstrated that “data” is a historically specific and culturally contingent concept. Its meaning, materiality, and epistemic function have shifted dramatically: from its Latin roots, to its mathematical usage in the seventeenth century, to its contemporary computational ubiquity (Gitelman 2013; Rosenberg 2018). Yet this scholarship draws almost entirely on European and North American experiences. As a result, our current age of Big Data and AI can come to appear, however unintentionally, as the natural and inevitable destination of all human information practices, as though no other outcome had ever been possible.

China’s past tells a different story. Across more than two thousand years, Chinese states, merchants, and scholars alike developed sophisticated and often radically different ways of producing, processing, and using what might be described as the functional kins of our “data”: regulated information, known or assumed as evidence for further actions, used to govern populations and territories, run businesses, or observe the Heaven. Rather than primitive antecedents to modern “data”, they represented fundamentally distinct configurations of how numbers, facts, and authority were brought into relation with one another. Many of these systems experienced rise and fall—they declined, were intentionally dismantled, and were also reassembled and reappropriated. Regimes akin to our Big Data, in other words, have been made and unmade before (Kaplan & di Lenardo 2017).

Towards a Chinese History of Data, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, sets out to recover this historical diversity of data regimes and to dislodge the assumption that our current paradigm is the only rational endpoint. Using data as a heuristic, this project aims to answer the questions:

• Where does “data” illuminate something in Chinese sources that documents, facts, information, or the autochthonous terms such as shu 數, jizhang 籍帳, lihai 利害 leave in the dark? And where does it distort, overreach, or fail?
• Which dimensions—given-ness, instrumentality, or regulation—do Chinese sister concepts render differently?
• What did historical actors do to render the world legible and operable through numbers and facts, and what was lost, withheld, or unmade in the process?

Bibliography

Borgman, Christine L. Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

Day, Ronald E. Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Gitelman, Lisa, ed. “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.

Kaplan, Frédéric, and Isabella di Lenardo. “Big Data of the Past.” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 4 (2017): 1–12.

Rosenberg, Daniel. “Data as Word.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 48, no. 5 (2018): 557–567.