WORK
"Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron
Gitelman's edited 2013 MIT Press volume whose title became one of the most cited phrases in contemporary data studies — the founding text that established data as constructed, not given.
The volume gathered essays by historians of science, media theorists, and critical data studies scholars — including Daniel Rosenberg's etymological history of the term data, Geoffrey Bowker's analysis of database categories, and Paul Edwards's work on climate data infrastructures. The collection's central argument, encoded in its title, is that data is never raw: it is always cooked by the instruments that collect it, the institutions that commission it, the categories that organize it, and the assumptions that determine what counts as data in the first place. The volume's influence on critical data studies has been enormous; its title functions as a rallying phrase for scholars working to denaturalize the technology industry's presentation of data as pre-cultural and pre-institutional. In the AI age, the argument acquires a second life: the phrase AI-generated content performs the same sleight of hand the volume was designed to expose.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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