A Social Science of Databases -- Workshop Symposium

A SOCIAL SCIENCE OF DATABASES: BUILDING METAPHYSICAL MACHINES.

This event presents six papers, five from social scientists and one from a computer scientists, each thinking about the creation, maintenance, and gestalt qualities of the machines that house and transmit data. That is, about databases.

A free lunch will be provided for all attendees.

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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), understanding the machines which house data becomes a more urgent empirical problem. This workshop, hopes to sketch a manifesto for how such work might proceed in the social sciences.

This event is part of the DARE research project which was selected for funding by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UKRI through a Frontier Research Grant [Ref EP/Y027620/1].

WORKSHOP SYMPOSIUM [provisional] AGENDA

1000 __Open

Coffee + tea

1030 __Opening remarks

1045 __Papers [provisional listing]

• The Appraisal Machine. Archival Frictions in Data-Driven European Security [Megan Hadasa Leal Causton]
• Title TBC [Paolo Guagliardo]
• The Database As Epistemic Engine: Incentives In Academic Publishing [Paul Stevens]

1215 __Lunch [provided]

1300 __Papers [provisional listing]

• 'Database Ontologies': The Concretisation of Techno-Certainty [Max Perry]
• Valuing Data, Making Data Valuable: Valuation Practices Across Biodata Resources [Roman Hansen]
• Emperor’s New Crowds: “Untrustworthy” workers and “ground truth” [Laura Savolainen]

1430 __Break

Coffee + tea

1500 __Manifesto for social science of databases

Q+A [roundtable]

1545 __Closing remarks

1600 __Close

.....

citations__

Beaulieu, A. & Leonelli, S. (2021) Data & Society: A Critical Introduction. Washington, D.C: SAGE Publications Ltd.

Bowker, G. C. & Star, S. L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification And Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass. ; MIT Press.

Cuffe, R. (2025) Data, waves and wind to be counted in the economy. BBC News [Online]. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/czedpnen168o [Accessed: 10/03/2025]

Hoeyer, K. (2023) Data Paradoxes: The Politics of Intensified Data Sourcing in Contemporary Healthcare, London: MIT Press.

Tempini, N. (2021) Data curation-research: practices of data standardization and exploration in a precision medicine database. New genetics and society. [Online] 40 (1), 73–94.