"Redistributing Data Worlds: Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Democracy", Statistique Et Société, 5

English language version of: Gray, J. (2017).
Quand les mondes de données sont redistribués:

Open Data, infrastructures de données et démocratie. Statistique et Société, 5(3), 29–34.
Available at: http://publications-sfds.fr/index.php/stat_soc/article/view/658
Redistributing Data Worlds:

Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Democracy
Jonathan Gray
King’s College London
For centuries human beings have invented methods and instruments for taking
account of different aspects of the world through numbers. Making data about
people, places, resources and things has become an indispensable part of the fabric
of collective life and efforts to map and shape it.
The apparent power and transformational potential of such numbers has long
inspired wonder, concern and action of various kinds, both for better and for worse.
Data is imagined and used to understand, steer and refashion the world, whether in
the service of boosting economic growth or redistributing resources; exploiting
natural resources or conserving ecologies; promoting public health and education or
cracking down on crime or dissent; turning land into territory and people into citizens,
consumers, workers, comrades or suspects. Accounts of such projects can be found
in a growing literature of histories and sociologies of quantification and statistics.1
What happens to these social practices and imaginaries of quantification when

readily available digital technologies facilitate the creation, analysis and reproduction
of data by different publics? What kinds of shifts, dynamics, controversies, visions
and programmes can be observed when data goes digital? One recent answer to
these questions can be found in the phenomenon of open data, which can be
understood as set of ideas and conventions aiming to turn information into a re-
usable public resource.
Through open data practices and initiatives, the by-products of administration,

governance and other activities of public institutions can be transformed into a “raw”
1
See, for example, Hacking, 1985; Porter, 1986, 1996; Desrosières, 2002; Espeland & Stevens,
2008; Rottenburg, Merry, Park, & Mugler, 2015; Bruno, Jany-Catrice, & Touchelay, 2016.
English language version of: Gray, J. (2017). Quand les mondes de données sont redistribués:
resource – variously described as the “new gold”, the “new oil” or the “new soil”. This
is pursued through a series of legal, technical and social conventions which are
intended to make data public in order to catalyse various forms of innovation beyond
and across the public sector. These conventions draw upon a constellation of
cultures and norms associated with open source, free software, free culture, civic
hacking, data journalism, linked data, agile software development and web 2.0
communities. Following Howard Becker’s analysis of the conventions which hold “art
worlds” together (Becker, 1984), what kinds of “data worlds” do these open data
conventions support?
Some of these conventions aim to make data legally and technically re-usable. Thus
open licenses, legal regimes and information policies aim to mitigate the effects of
copyright and database rights which may inhibit the re-use of public data by clarifying
that it may be legally re-used without payment or permission – drawing on legal
practices associated with free/open source software, free culture, open access and
open science groups. There are strong norms for publicly documented, accessible,
structured file formats, prioritising “machine readable” data formats such as comma-
separated values (CSV), JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) and Excel spreadsheet
(XLS) formats over print layout formats such as the PDF.
Figure 1 Screenshot of data.gov.uk data portal showing preview of spending data from UK Cabinet
Office, with open data license metadata under dataset title, raw data download button on right hand
side, and preview of structured data in the bottom half of the page.
There are also hundreds of local, regional and national data portals from states,
citizens, NGOs and companies which aggregate data from different sources in order
to make it easier to find and re-use. For example, Figure 1 shows a page from the
data.gov.uk data portal which is dedicated to spending data from the UK’s Cabinet
Office, which shows the open license promoting re-usability, as well a preview of
structured tabular data which can be downloaded.
There are hackdays and hackathons, intended to promote re-use of open data – as
well as fellowships, challenges, incubators and labs to promote innovation and
collaboration. These have given rise to hundreds of apps, data projects, interactives,
prototypes, websites and digital products and services which use this open data to
various ends – whether through creating new maps, data visualisations, data stories
and “data investigations” or through personalising, customising, narrating, filtering
and combining information in other ways.
These developments have been propelled forward by different visions of what might
happen by opening up official data. Some suggest that this can improve the
transparency and accountability of public institutions – e.g. to create projects that
show how public funds are spent. Others say that data will help increase public
sector efficiency and reduce costs, by enlisting “armchair auditors” to identify waste
and by allowing and encouraging non-state actors to produce websites and services
which would otherwise be produced with public funds. Others contend that public
data can be used to create websites and projects which strengthen democracy – e.g.
by allowing citizens to contact public institutions or politicians or coordinate around
civic or collective tasks. Others maintain that data can be used by new businesses,
technology companies and start-ups to create jobs and stimulate economic growth.
Open data can thus be understood as a malleable concept which is reconfigured to
align with different conceptions of public institutions, markets, and social life (Gray,
2014).
How does open data shape social practices of quantification? Here we may look
beyond the datasets that open data advocates valorise as raw material for
innovation, and back towards the data infrastructures through which these datasets
are created. Following other scholars of information infrastructures, these data
infrastructures may be viewed as socio-technical arrangements which underpin the
production of data: consisting of relational ecologies of software components, data
standards, methods, techniques, committees, researchers, instruments and other
things (Bowker & Star, 1998, 2000; Star, 1999; Bowker, Baker, Millerand, & Ribes,
2009). We may also look at the data worlds which datasets are part of – including
how data infrastructures make it possible for different actors to see, engage with and
relate to things in different ways (Gray, 2018).
Open data enables and promises different forms of redistribution and reconfiguration
of these data infrastructures and data worlds – from social democratic visions of
participation in public institutions and public service delivery, to information policies
which seek to limit the role of the state to providing “raw” data which non-state actors
can then use as the basis for information products and services (Gray, 2014). For a
start, the digital distribution of data means that the number of people who are able to
access and use it is, in principle, multiplied to include anyone with an internet
connection and the requisite background knowledge to use it. Commodity database
and data storage, analysis and visualisation technologies mean that the contexts of
usage of public sector data can extend far beyond the statisticians, administrators,
managers, researchers and civil servants who are involved with its production and
use in public institutions. New “styles of reasoning” (as Hacking puts it) and new
genres of sense-making are rendered possible – as data moves from policy reports
to mobile apps and interactive online graphics.
As datasets are recombined, extracted, hybridised, reformatted, reconstructed, re-

use and given different meanings by new actors – new data worlds emerge. The
redistribution of these data worlds can be understood in at least three ways (Gray,
2018).
Firstly, we might consider the redistribution of data worlds in terms of changing the
composition the social worlds of “data experience” and “data work” as a distributed,
collective accomplishment. Open data initiatives aspire to bring about redistributions
in the collectives associated with public information, explicitly reaching out to new
actors beyond the public sector (whether citizens, civil society groups, students,
researchers, journalists, start-ups or technology companies) through mechanisms
such as social media channels, meetups, mailing lists, labs, incubators, hackathons,
fellowship schemes, crowdsourcing initiatives, apps, data projects, data “sprints”,
data “expeditions” and dedicated websites. Data portals invite users to download
public data and make their own apps, visualisations, websites and services. Open
data initiatives aim to harness the wisdom of the crowd, the expertise and
experience of different actors outside the state to, as one UK government initiative
put it: “Show Us a Better Way”.2
Thus we might examine both the practices and imaginaries of public participation,
public engagement, co-design and innovation around public data – and the effects of
these shifts, from new political economic configurations to emerging forms of public
space, mobilisation, societal controversy and issue formation. We can see how it is
envisaged that these redistributions will occur, for example, by examining “data
imaginaries” and “data speak”. We may also look at what kinds of social collectives –
“data publics” – are actually assembled around public data in practice, as well as
what the politics and patterning of devices and procedures of public involvement,
and which kinds of publics they include and do not include.
Secondly: we may consider redistributions in the composition of data worlds in terms

of changing how things are rendered intelligible: providing conditions of possibility for
experiencing, understanding, interacting with and making sense of the world. To
paraphrase Bruno Latour: change the instruments, and you will change how things
are seeable, sayable and doable with data. Here we can look at the new meaning-
making practices associated with open data – including aggregating and combining
data from different sources; through the use of machine learning, algorithms and
new analytical techniques; through the creation of new kinds of data visualisations
and “data experiences”; or through technological products and features which
facilitate different modes of relating to data – such as through online platforms,
2
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7484131.stm
mobile apps, geolocation, tagging, annotation, crowdsourcing, real-time notifications,

augmented and virtual reality, wearable technologies and immersive multimedia
installations.
Open data thus not only changes who can use different representational resources
about the world, but also facilitates new kinds of creative practices for making sense
of collective life. For example, the “Walkonomics” app (Figure 2) combines multiple
sources of open public data with user generated data in order to provide ratings for
the "walkability" of different regions and routes in several major cities – providing a
new device for collectively quantifying, ranking and relating to urban places.
Figure 2 The "Walkonomics" App for iPhone and Android suggests the “walkability” of different routes and
regions within major urban regions by combining different data sources, interfaces and interactive features.3
Thirdly: we may look at how open data changes data worlds in terms of the
reshaping of the relations, alliances and territories of political world-making projects
(and perhaps more recently – world-unmaking projects), as per recent research on
the sociology of the transnational circuitry of globalisation. Transnational open data
3
See: http://www.walkonomics.com/ and https://data.gov.uk/apps/walkonomics-find-walkable-route
projects facilitate new regimes of transnational quantification and the aggregation,

harmonisation and standardisation of data.
For example, Open Street Map enables users to add geospatial data from a wide
variety of sources – from public sector agencies to data that they have collected
themselves or traced from maps.4 The Open Contracting Partnership creates new
standards in order to enable “shareable, reusable, machine readable” public sector
contracting data which is aligned and comparable across borders.5 The Open
Spending aggregates millions of spending transactions from over 70 countries.6
Open Ownership aims to create a new global register of “who controls and benefits
from companies”.7 These cases may be construed as new transnational networks of
expertise, exchange and knowledge transfer in order to align and standardise “data
work” across borders.
By way of concluding this short missive, I hope that these three ways of looking at
the redistribution of data worlds – in terms of social collectives, meaning-making
practices and transnational networks – will help to draw attention to different aspects
of the politics of open data and public information, and how digital technologies are
giving rise to different social practices and styles of quantification. Whilst the open
data rhetoric often emphasises the “liberation” of pre-existing public sector data in
order to fuel innovation and the extraction of value, this is not without translation,
mediation and new kinds of social practices and social worlds. The transposition of
data from the public sector to various other actors is giving rise to new kinds of “data
worlds”.
In some cases, pre-existing and sometimes long entrenched public data

infrastructures and practices may “parameterise” and give structure to novel forms of
data experience. For example, fiscal data standards from international organisations
shape the spending categories which are rendered into interactive data
visualisations and experiences – creating innovative information products which
4
See: https://www.openstreetmap.org/
5
See: https://www.open-contracting.org/about/
6
See: https://openspending.org/
7
See: http://openownership.org/
nevertheless reinforce certain ways of looking at and thinking about fiscal policy. In
other cases emerging “data publics” may attempt to reshape public data
infrastructures or create their own as an emerging form of digital “issue work”. Thus,
for example, journalists and activists have recently created their own databases of
police killings, migrant deaths, pollution events, literacy measurements or water
supply evaluations as a means to change how different issues are collectively taken
into account through data (Gray, Lämmerhirt, & Bounegru, 2016).
A movement which started life calling for opening up official datasets may yet contain
the seeds of a more ambitious political programme to open up public space,
imagination, participation, deliberation, contestation and creativity around the making
of data (Gray, 2016). What could be read in terms of a tendency for a grassroots
institutionalisation of certain styles of reasoning, modes of experiencing and genres
of quantifying issues (inherited as a by-product of administration and governance in
the public sector) could nevertheless serve as the basis for more rich and meaningful
democratic deliberation around what and how things are taken into account through
data, and with what effects. At a time when public trust in institutions is said to be
waning and yet the scale of the large, collective issues that we face is considered to
be without precedent in modern times, such public experimentation around the role
of data in democratic societies is surely to be welcomed. While the study of open
data does indeed suggest ways in which it may be used as a means to accelerate
and socially institutionalise different forms of marketisation and bureacratisation, it
may also sometimes reward us with reminders that other data worlds are possible.
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English language version of: Gray, J. (2017).

Quand les mondes de données sont redistribués:

Redistributing Data Worlds:

What happens to these social practices and imaginaries of quantification when

Through open data practices and initiatives, the by-products of administration,

As datasets are recombined, extracted, hybridised, reformatted, reconstructed, re-

Secondly: we may consider redistributions in the composition of data worlds in terms

mobile apps, geolocation, tagging, annotation, crowdsourcing, real-time notifications,

projects facilitate new regimes of transnational quantification and the aggregation,

In some cases, pre-existing and sometimes long entrenched public data

Becker, H. S. (1984). Art Worlds. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Desrosières, A. (2002). The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical

Espeland, W. N., & Stevens, M. L. (2008). A Sociology of Quantification. European

Gray, J. (2014). Towards a Genealogy of Open Data. Presented at the European

Gray, J. (2016). Datafication and Democracy: Recalibrating Digital Information

Hacking, I. (1985). Making People Up. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. E. Wellbery

Porter, T. M. (1986). The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900. Princeton, NJ:

Porter, T. M. (1996). Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and

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