Raw Data Is an Oxymoron (Infrastructures)

Book Preface

The preparation and publication of “ Raw Data ” Is an Oxymoron has involved sustained collaboration over several years. I ’ d like to thank Jennie Jackson and the many contributors to the volume, in particular, for their thinking and their patience. Were the zillions of emails we exchanged ever collected into a book, it would be a sizeable companion volume or perhaps a multivolume set. I ’ d also like to thank series editors Geoffrey Bowker and Paul Edwards for their interest in and support of this project, as well as for their own valuable publications in the emerging field that one might — if one wished — call data studies. Whether it is apparent to them or not, their thinking has been an inspiration at every turn, as have so many ongoing discussions with colleagues in and about the humanities, particularly at the interdisciplinary junction where media studies and science and technology studies share such interesting and important interrogative terrain. Marguerite Avery at the MIT Press has been an attentive and discerning editor, first to last, as well as a smart, supportive interlocutor, and I ’ m very grateful to her. Further practical assistance and moral and intellectual support has been rendered by Theresa M. Collins, while my research in the final stages of this project has been supported in part by a fellowship at New York University ’ s Humanities Initiative.