Naming Things.

And if you swear that there’s no truth, and who cares. 

How come you say it like you’re right?

--- Bright Eyes, We are Nowhere and it’s Now.

In June we ran a two-day workshop bringing scholars from across Europe together to discuss databases. 

The title —A Social Science of Databases: Building Metaphysical Machines— was my idea, and thus any blame for it belongs to me…

I started the ‘social science of databases’ workshop saying that its name didn’t matter. I repeated this at the end of day-one and again at the start of day-two. At the end of day-two in my closing remarks I said again that it didn’t matter again. The name was a placeholder, a throwaway idea that was useful as a spark and nothing more. However, as is often the case with such things, over the course of two days… I think I convinced myself (if no one else) that it was something more… 

During a coffee break on the first day, my boss and the DARE PI, Cath Mongomery asked me whether I had meant to use the term: ‘database studies’. I apparently had started using this during the first day. I didn’t have a good answer; no? I felt like I was hearing the term for the first time myself… 

I have always been fond of a certain degree of terminological slippage. I go off things as their ubiquity makes them staid. I am a child of a certain Deleuzian vocabulary that concerns itself not with the names we reward things with, but with the things they do to gain such an honour. I think language finds its beauty in its ability to gesture and not to point. I was happy with ‘database studies’, but I wasn’t attached to it. I didn’t want to coin it, and I didn’t want it to point at something in particular.

The key concern for our workshop was whether ‘databases’ constituted something that had not been properly gestured towards by social scientists. Of course, a database is a known thing, a thing most people are at least conceptually familiar with. But in social science, and particularly in Science and Technology Studies, the trend is to talk about data not databases. My contention was that it might prove productive for some of us to start, at least for a little while, to talk about databases.

This seems abstract, obtuse, stupid…? It sounds it to me as I write this as well.   

Let me start here where I started then and see if we can’t manoeuvre ourselves towards something that makes a little more sense. As a project, we DARE researchers are trying to discover how data, care, and learning operate in an era of ‘data-driven healthcare’. I work at the ‘scale’ of policy. Almost all healthcare policy, as it concerns data, is directed towards the invocation of greater-and-greater production of data as an 'asset'. What Klaus Hoeyer has called ‘intensified data sourcing’ (2023). What interests me as a researcher in DARE, is not this will to data itself, but the social phenomena which this will brings into being. As other STS theorists have ably demonstrated, data are not things that are extracted but are practices; these practices happen in —and are contingent on, and constitutive of— our social world (see: Lionelli & Tempini [2020] and Ruppert & Scheel [2021]).

Now, if I am to understand how data, care, and learning, operate in healthcare at the scale of policy, what practices am I to concern myself with? Policy makers are rarely sat at a computer entering data, caring for patients, or learning about the bodies of the sick. Instead policy makers concern themselves with the construction of a professional infrastructure through which data practices, care practices and learning practices will be performed. That is, policy concerns the architectural design of the conditions of possibility within which such practices can be performed.

So, it is in the search of a better social science of these conditions of possibility that I thought it might be worth exploring the word ‘database’, above the word ‘data’. What I was interested to find out, through this workshop, was whether others had found themselves more concerned with the conditions of possibility of data practices, than with data practices themselves. That is, to see whether there were others that found a need to gesture in a slightly different direction. Not towards data but towards databases.

Through two days, we kept coming back to the question of whether ‘databases’ really did constitute something else? Was it not a subset of the broader field of STS that studies data practices? Was it not also included in critical archive studies? Was it not better outlined in Nanna B. Thylstrup’s ‘critical dataset studies’? These questions, I wanted to claim, didn’t matter. To paraphrase Shakespear’s Juliet in the Capulet’s orchard: The name of a thing is not the thing.

I wanted to argue that it was worthwhile holding up the term databases just to have a look at it. To see if doing so might not produce something exciting and novel. If it didn't work, or if it seemed grubby and opaque, or if it seemed to refract the light at odd angles, well we could happily  let it disappear once we were through looking at it. But as is often the case when you give a name to a thing, you grow fond of it. I, over two days, grew fond of it.

In truth naming something has power, particularly for an academic. A power that is borne out in the grim and grubby determinacy of citation metrics… perhaps I am seduced by the appeal of authorship?

More hopefully, in this instance, the name ‘a social science of databases’ cast a spell which brought four academics to Edinburgh to talk about shared interests. It brought me into contact with the work of database theorists working in computer science departments around the world, into contact with academics here in the Edinburgh computer science department who are conducting their own rudimentary social science experiments (Toussaint et al. 2022), and it convened a symposium in which 20 odd people listened to talks about relational databases, about academic publishing, about Europol, about crowdsourced data annotation, about healthcare ontologies and about bioscientific data sharing. Each contextualised uniquely with a piece of thread we had weaved together between ourselves over the previous days and weeks. 

The power of that name and the spell it cast seemed pleasant to me. I liked looking at and through it, and I want to do it again. I am hopeful, now that I’m a little more practiced with its use, I could use it again to produce something else. Something else that might be able to gesture towards the ways that things are, in healthcare and in the world more broadly. Something like a special issue in a journal perhaps…

Some names grow staid more quickly than others, and some names don’t get to become something so luxurious as ‘staid’… Can’t hurt to find out what we can do with this name. ‘A Social Science of Databases’. Perhaps it won’t work this time. If that happens, I’ll see if I can’t just find another name… perhaps I’ll try ‘Database Studies’?