The reuse of digital computer data: Transformation, recombination and generation of data mixes in big data science

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the relationship between the materiality of digital computer data and their reuse in scientific practice. It builds on the case study of a ‘data mash-up’ infrastructure for research with environmental, weather and population health data. I problematise the extent to which scientists reusing digital computer data heavily manipulate the sources through complex and situated calculative operations, as they attempt to re-situate data well beyond the epistemic community in which they originated, and adapt them to different theoretical frameworks, methods and evidential standards. The chapter interrogates the consequent relationship between derivative data and the data sources from which they originate. The deep relationality of scientific computer data is multi-layered and scaffolded, as it depends on relations between various kinds of data, computing technologies, assumptions, theoretical scaffoldings, hypotheses and other features of the situation at hand.