Most literature thinks of the relationship between data and society as additive, meaning that data and society are seen as two separate sets of things but which overlap to form an intersection. The literature then goes off to unpack the intersection of the two circles and partners the term data in this manner with terms descriptive of the domain of society — ownership, control, surveillance, and privacy, to name but a few.Within this book, we want to promote an alternative viewpoint of the relationship between data and society. Rather than explaining how data fits with or contributes to some burning societal issues, we want to explain how data is constitutive of many such issues. The term constitutive is used here in the sense of data having power to institute, establish, or enact society.Our viewpoint means that if you are to properly understand the constitutive nature of data, you must start from first principles and closely examine the nature of data itself. You must also focus on the mechanics of data — how data is represented and articulated in records or more generally in data structures.Our aim in doing this is to examine the place of data structures across cultures and societies. In doing so, we hope to better understand why we, as humans, make records. In doing this, we can also better understand some of the unintended consequences of the use of records, which particularly plague us in the modern world.
Contents:

• About the Author
  
• List of Figures
  
• List of Tables
  
• Prologue
  
• Making Marks
  
• Data Structures
  
• Identifying Things: The Informativity of the Record
  
• Making Lists: The Performativity of the Record
  
• Coordination Problems
  
• The 'Life' of the Record
  
• Instituting Place, Product, Time and Digital Presence
  
• Building Ontology
  
• The Power of Records
  
• Scaffolding Commerce
  
• Data-Driven Actors
  
• The Mechanics of Echo Chambers
  
• The Modern Panopticon: Data and Surveillance
  
• Counting Heads
  
• A Social Ontology of Big Data
  
• Epilogue
  
• Bibliography
  
• Index
  

Readership: Undergraduate, post-graduate, academics, and professionals specialising in information systems, information management, and data science.