Afterword: Data in transit

Abstract

The naïve fantasy that data have an immediate relation to the phenomena of the world, that they are “objective” in some strong, ontological, sense of that term, that they are the facts of the world directly speaking to us, should be finally laid to rest by the papers collected in this volume. In this afterword, I propose that these papers, investigating data journeys in fields from particle physics to urban planning, show that even the primary, original, state of data is not free from researchers’ value- and theory-laden selection and organization.