A history of data

The wordWhat are data?

“Data: a reinterpretable representation of information in a formalized manner, suitable for communication, interpretation, or processing.”— ISO/IEC 2382:2015

Today data surround us. We count our steps, measure temperature, record purchases, track the economy. Organisations store billions of records, and artificial intelligence models learn from enormous collections of them. Yet we rarely stop to ask what the word “data” actually means, and why we call them that.

The English word data is the plural of the Latin datum, “that which is given”. Curiously, the Lithuanian duoti (“to give”, the root of duomenys, “data”) and the Latin dare are related words, descended from a common Indo-European root.

But are data really given? In today's world we more often collect, measure, select and process them. Someone decides what to measure, how precisely, what to record and what to leave out.

That is why in 2011 the scholar Johanna Drucker proposed seeing data as capta, “that which is taken”, rather than simply given. The difference is not only linguistic. It reminds us that data do not appear by themselves; how they come about often depends on our choices.

To understand how this paradox arose, it helps to look back at history.

Around 300 BCWhen data did not yet mean facts

Around 300 BC the Greek mathematician Euclid wrote a work called Dedomena, a title meaning “things given”. It was later translated into Latin as Data.

For Euclid, a given was what we already know, or take as established, in a geometry problem.

This meaning lasted a long time. In seventeenth-century English philosophical and theological writing, data was used for accepted premises from which conclusions were drawn.

Only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the word come to be tied more and more to observations, experiments and collected facts.

The historian of science Daniel Rosenberg describes this as a kind of semantic inversion: what changed was less the literal meaning of the word than what people were inclined to treat as “given”.

We used to call data what we accept as given so that we can prove something. Today we often call data what we use to try to prove something.

Still, one feature remained. Even in modern research, data become the starting conditions for further reasoning, much like the known quantities in a maths problem.

8000–3200 BCData older than the word

If we understand data more broadly, as recorded information about the world, their history is far older than Euclid or the Latin language.

Around 8000 BC people in the Near East were already using small clay tokens. Their different shapes are thought to have stood for particular goods or quantities: grain, livestock, other farm resources.

Later, around 3200 BC, some of the first written economic records appeared in Mesopotamia: quantities of grain, livestock counts, rations issued and other administrative data.

Here lies one of the most interesting theories of the origin of writing. The archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat proposed that writing in Mesopotamia gradually developed from clay tokens used for accounting, and from their impressions.

In other words, one of humanity's most important technologies may have come not from a need to write down poetry, philosophy or religious stories, but from a far more down-to-earth question: how much grain belongs to whom?

Although the exact way tokens turned into writing is still debated, archaeological finds strongly support the role of accounting and administration in the development of early Mesopotamian writing.

It was an important cognitive shift. People gained the ability not only to remember events but to keep their symbolic representations beyond the limits of their own memory. A recorded quantity could be passed to another person, compared with another record, or checked many years later.

Of course, abstract and symbolic thinking existed much earlier. The paintings in the Chauvet cave in France, made some 36,000 years ago, bear witness to it. The animals they show are recognisable even today.

So writing did not create our ability to think in symbols. It made it possible to keep those symbols, accumulate them, pass them on and use them systematically, independently of any one person's memory.

1662–1854When records began to reveal what no one could see

For a long time records mainly helped to manage property, run cities and register events. But gradually people began to realise that many separate records could reveal more than any one of them says.

In 1662 the English merchant John Graunt analysed London's Bills of Mortality. These registers had been compiled long before his study, but Graunt saw in them patterns of mortality and other statistical regularities in the population.

A single person's death says nothing about the mortality trends of a whole society. But when thousands of such records are gathered, structures appear that no single observer could see directly. It is one of the early examples of modern demography and statistical analysis.

Almost two centuries later, data analysis helped with a different kind of problem.

In 1854 a cholera outbreak struck London. The physician John Snow investigated where the dead had lived, where they got their water, and what might connect them. The evidence he gathered pointed to one water pump on Broad Street.

The local authorities removed the pump handle. Snow's famous cholera map was published in 1855, after that decision. Although the outbreak had begun to decline before the handle came off, the story became a landmark example in epidemiology.

It showed how systematically collected and interpreted data can help us understand causal links and justify action.

Data no longer only described the world; they helped make decisions that could change it.