Bowk­er, G.C. (2014). The Theory/Data Thing. Inter­na­tion­al Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion 8 (2043), 1795–1799.

Thanks to Bar­ry Brown for for­ward­ing this com­men­tary by Geof­frey Bowker.
I accept Bowk­er’s crit­i­cism of Latour (although it is some­what sweep­ing), and I like the point that it’s ‘under­stand­ing’ that’s at stake. Latour’s flat­ten­ing of net­works (à la Tarde) has been use­ful for me in think­ing through agency and entan­gle­ments, but it starts to run out of steam when it comes to thick­en­ing under­stand­ing — (I’m in favour of Latour’s pre-Tar­dian actor-network).
I do won­der though how we might say some­thing more on this data thing? It does­n’t seem enough now to crit­i­cise those pro­claim­ing the end of the­o­ries, cat­e­gories and indeed ethnog­ra­phy. We know big data, much like any oth­er inter­pre­tive act, slices through and embroi­ders a kind of truth. The greater chal­lenge is to ask what does data do that might thick­en truths and give them some (more/other) legs, so to speak? I’d want to know what Bowk­er thinks this (big) data thing might be good for and whether they might just enable oth­er forms of understanding.