Colloquium: Prof. Dr. Matthias Leese

Today there is hardly any policy-area that is not underpinned by data. Social scientists have, however, so far paid surprisingly little attention to data themselves. Data are partial and fluid representations that constantly change form and informational value, as they are being cleaned, updated, merged, archived, or deleted. This paper argues for a stronger research agenda that conceptualizes data as a recursive phenomenon and investigates the practices of those actors involved in their production, transmission, correction, consolidation, and so on. Importantly, as those practices are key in how data inform policy-making and governance, they should be understood as ontopolitics that warrant close empirical engagement.