A Social Science of Databases -- Open Workshop Symposium

A SOCIAL SCIENCE OF DATABASES: BUILDING METAPHYSICAL MACHINES.

This event presents six papers from social science scholars thinking about the creation, maintenance, and gestalt qualities of the machines that house and transmit data; about databases. A free lunch will be provided for all attendees.

Contemporary society is marked by a will to data. The accumulation of a form of empirical material that is tabulated, quantifiable and ontologically fixed as ‘data’ is now a de facto imperative for the improvement of society ethically, normatively, and scientifically. What Hoeyer has called ‘intensified data sourcing’ (Hoeyer, 2023) has in this way become a prominent feature of public institutions, private organisations, and —increasingly— of technologies of the self (oft rendered material through bespoke and individuated ‘smart’ devices whose primary function is the production of ‘data’).

Social scientists attending to data practices have evidenced the sociality of data usages (Beaulieu & Leonelli, 2020), of processes of transformation in creating data (Bowker & Star, 1999), and of the curation of data towards instrumental purposes (Tempini, 2021). In so doing data has been productively theorised and empirically located as a socio-material practice. However, less has been said about the machines built to store and manage data; about data infrastructures. These machines represent a novel opportunity for understanding our contemporary societies. Where data sourcing often prefigures its usages, where value is located not in the ends data is put to (in the knowledge that is produced), but in the presence of data at all (in the size and ‘quality’ of the database) (See: Cuffe, 2025), the understanding of the machines which house data becomes a more urgent empirical problem.

BOOK TICKETS HERE

WORKSHOP SYMPOSIUM [provisional] AGENDA

1000 COFFEE

1030 INTRODUCTION

1045 PAPER: TBC

1115 PAPER: TBC

1145 PAPER: TBC

1215 LUNCH

1315 PAPER: TBC

1345 PAPER: TBC

1415 PAPER: TBC

1445 COFFEE/BREAK

1515 MANIFESTO FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE OF DATABASES [roundtable]

1600 CLOSE