Being with Data. Nathaniel Tkacz
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in a specific way such that it is amenable to a pre-existing epistemic order (i.e., economic science). And it is used to define how one thing relates to, or acts upon, another.
In later writings, Latour uses the concept once again to highlight the active, performative role of knowledge construction, but now as part of a negative contrast: ‘The notion of “fact,” let us recall, had the disadvantage of not taking into account the enormous work of shaping, formatting, ordering, and deducing, needed to give the data a meaning that they never have on their own.’31 Here, the idea refers to the active work needed to give data meaning; work that can go unnoticed once something attains the status of fact. Latour tends to use this notion of formatting to point to the practical elements of knowledge construction that are easily overlooked, though not invisible or hidden. Part of what the term ‘formatting’ does, as a verb, is ascribe these practical and mundane elements some force and an active role in the production of realities.
Like Latour and Callon, I too see formatting as a performative notion, able to describe the ‘how’ of one thing’s relation to another. I like the way Latour places it within a context of knowledge production and the overlooked (but not invisible) elements that feed into and define more finished products (like facts). However, my own use is more literal and specific than Latour’s. I want to stick much more closely to the notion of format when I invoke formatting. Formatting refers to the bidirectional performativity of a format as it is enacted (or ‘used’, in more common parlance). It refers to how a format acts on the data and other elements that pass through (and thereby constitute) it and on the people, devices, and organizational time-spaces within which it is deployed. To describe the active work of a format as formatting suggests a specificity to its performativity. Formatting is not a free-for-all; it has limits, its ‘tendencies’ in terms of what it can achieve in any given situation. What a format does is carry along these specificities, limits and tendencies; they are in part what constitute it as a format; they give it its consistency and make it recognizable. Understanding these specificities does not allow us to grasp the entirety of what’s going on when a format is at work (a difficult and questionable aim in any case), but can serve as a privileged point of orientation. It enables contrast and comparison of different empirical instances and permits one to rise up, if cautiously, and posit certain generalities and regularities (carried forth as tendencies in a format) among such instances.
To get a sense of the work of formatting and how significant a format can be to societal-level organization, consider what is in some ways a precursor to the dashboard: double-entry bookkeeping (DEB). While DEB is known as a method for keeping accounts, it also serves as an excellent example of a format (or rather, a number of closely related formats). Consider the striking parallels between how I have defined a format thus far and how DEB is defined by Hans Derks:
a way of organising, arranging, registering accounting data of ventures (public and private) that informs several users, in particular the owner(s), to improve decision-making, to uncover gain/loss, to track the entity’s rights and obligations, to recall past activities, and to achieve a greater control or surveillance of transactions internal and external to the firm or other institutions.32
As the name connotes, DEB involves entering financial transaction numbers into account ledgers (a format), with every transaction entered twice, appearing as a debit entry in one account (in a leftsided column) and as a credit entry in another account (in a rightsided column). Through entering every transaction as both debit and credit, the system should ‘balance’ and this acts as a safeguard against errors. Ostensibly, DEB involves arranging numbers for the purposes of keeping account. The numbers are arranged and ordered (formatted) through the ledger, and this imbues them with a specific value and meaning. The numbers become ‘accounting numbers’, representing financial values (credit and debit) in the context of business. However, a number of historical studies have shown there is much more to this format.
While the double-entry of numbers is core to this method of accounting, it is but a component of a larger system comprised of different books or journals (typically three). Historically, DEB made use of a daybook, a journal and a final ledger of accounts, and one could approach each as a format in its own right, but for the sake of brevity I treat them together. As the names suggest, each book or journal serves a different purpose within a larger system, moving from more descriptive records of daily transactions (daybook) to more abstract forms of numerical representation (ledgers). In her excellent history of the modern fact, Mary Poovey has argued that DEB played a crucial role in the becoming factual of numbers; that is, in numbers’ capacity to appear beyond matters of interpretation.33 Poovey was precisely interested in this question of how it came to be that some things appear as available for interpretation while others do not, or as she puts it, in ‘how description came to seem separate from interpretation or theoretical analysis; the story of how one kind of representation – numbers – came to seem immune from theory or interpretation’.34 DEB is crucially important for Poovey as it produced a kind of proto-factual form of numerical representation. This type of numerical representation was achieved by the parsing of economic activity through DEB’s system of books and from more detailed to abstract modes of writing numbers. This movement, which Poovey describes as one from narrative to number, imbued these numbers (and their related accounting practices) with specific capacities and a kind of authority. While I cannot convey the full extent of her argument here, Poovey positions DEB in contrast to Ciceronian rhetoric (influential in the late fifteenth century) and shows how the form of numerical representation found in DEB diverged from and challenged this dominant form of rhetoric. That one could move from narrative to number (and back) in DEB, for instance, ‘seemed to make writing transparent instead of performative, as rhetoric so obviously was’.35 She adds, moreover, that DEB ‘helped undermine the epistemology and social hierarchy associated with rhetoric’ by challenging Ciceronian scepticism through its system of representing numbers (that is, through its format). This was observable in the apparent transparency of the numbers themselves, but also, for example, in how DEB enabled ‘writing positions’36 which were not reliant on the same social hierarchy as that of rhetoric for their authority.
Poovey further argues that DEB didn’t do away with rhetoric entirely, but rather repositioned rhetoric as a component of the system, visible in different elements of its formats: ‘The system of double-entry books displayed virtue graphically, by the balances prominently featured at the end of each set of facing ledger pages and by the order evident in the books as a system.’37 The idea that late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century DEB was structured as a work of rhetoric is supported by others, such a James Aho, who has pointed out that everything from the ‘properly humble and thankful Christian salutation’ atop the ledger, to the ‘procedure to invent material for inclusion in the ledger’ or how the elements of the accounts relate to each other, all correspond to specific components of (largely) Ciceronian rhetoric.38
We see in DEB a specific formatting of economic activity; one that produces distinct kinds of numbers with an epistemological value that seemingly no longer requires interpretation and appears transparent to those who cast their eyes upon them. We also see, however, that whatever formatting work DEB accomplished, its formats are themselves pulled in different directions and take on different characteristics over time. The early DEB that Poovey and Aho consider was strongly influenced by rhetoric; it was literally arranged as rhetoric. Oddly enough, it was this arrangement that laid the grounds for numbers’ apparent transcendence of the epistemological conditions of rhetoric. While Poovey doesn’t straightforwardly equate DEB’s numbers with facts, she claims that in DEB the modern fact existed in ‘embryonic form’. DEB’s formatting produced a way of relating to numbers that foreshadowed the facts of modern science. While I find Poovey’s work compelling, one does not need to accept her argument about DEB and modern facts to get a sense of how a format is able to produce, through its arrangements, presentation and display (among other things), numbers with a distinct epistemological value. One can also see how a format is itself shaped by the forces of the day (in this case, Ciceronian rhetoric), in ways that might not be immediately obvious but clearly influence its arrangements and the qualities of things being arranged.39
For Poovey, the numbers found in DEB are significant