Formats, and the data they make possible, have implications that are difficult to see when viewed through the impressive edifices of contemporary data analytics. The history of electronic medical records reveals legacy information infrastructures on which today’s health data heavily depend, including crucial-yet-overlooked medical informatics put into circulation more than half a century ago. These legacy systems show how the data collected at sites of clinical encounter often depend on informational requirements that originate outside of the clinic, for instance in health insurance systems that institute billing requirements on clinical caregivers. [... read more about this topic ... ]

When we take genes or genomes to be essential determinants for who we are, we are taking ourselves to be programmable creatures, that is, creatures who can be formatted as codable data. It is indeed remarkable how commonly we take features of who we are to be programmable by genes. The feature, that is the trait or phenotype, must therefore itself be programmable. There is thus, at the conceptual level, a deep reliance on information theory and information technology at the heart of genetics. This reliance comes into focus in the history of genetic information in the 1940s through 1960s. [... read more about this topic ... ]

The deep immersion of our lives in data has a history that is well over a century old. Yet our datafied selfhood is often presented as a recent development. The work of early data science pioneer Francis Galton offers a frame for exploring assumptions that fund our data-driven moment. Francis Galton, today most widely known for his contributions to eugenics, was first and foremost a tinkering technician of measure. Printed blank forms were one of his key measuring technologies. Such forms remain technical and conceptual infrastructures upon which contemporary data storage and processing rely. Of course, Galton’s forms were also part of data collection apparatus that reproduced existing social inequalities. [ ... read more about this topic ... ]

We effortlessly think of ourselves and one another in familiar terms drawn from sciences of personality measurement. These sciences were first introduced in the early decades of the twentieth century. Experience ourselves in terms of traits such as extroversion or conscientiousness, our personalities are today formed through the measurable categories of psychometrics. Wielding a technical apparatus of questionnaires, algorithms, and graphs, personality psychology is an eminently informational science. The history of psychometric data science thus illuminates our present, for instance in terms of contemporary algorithmic perspectives on human psychology. [... read more about this topic ... ]

W.E.B. Du Bois was both one of his age’s greatest witnesses to America’s unrealized passions for equality and also one if its greatest innovators of methods in the informational analysis of social inequalities. Du Bois is still today widely affirmed as one of our most powerful progenitors of racial equality. Less widely recognized is that, as part of that crusade, Du Bois was a pioneering sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th century, whose contributions to both quantitative and qualitative analysis for too long went unrecognized. Du Bois’s work is, among other things, an egalitarian counter to the typological hereditarianism that dominated racial thinking in his day. Du Bois not only rejected this approach theoretically and ethically, but he also developed quantitative apparatus for representing race otherwise. [ ... read more about this topic ... ]

The history of racialized redlining by U.S. government agencies in the 1930s and 1940s drastically exacerbated racial inequality by helping to replace racism’s more violent histories with the innocent appearance of the clipboard. The technological history of redlining stretching back to the 1920s is a neglected story of the informatics of racism. The algorithms, database structures, and data collection apparatus at the heart of redlining were all perfected in this decade by private-industry appraisal professionals prior to the installation of this data apparatus in later government-backed mortgage-lending systems. [... read more about this topic ... ]

Birth certificates are our “breeder documents.” In the U.S. they are the originating form of identification from which all other identifying data, paperwork, files, and cards derive. Their significance to the daily lives of millions is attested in political contexts as otherwise disparate as immigration policy, child labor law, and miscegenation statutes. The genealogy of the standardization of birth certificates offers a view into how an innocent-seeming document became an obligatory attachment that is today fastened to every newborn within hours of birth. [... read more about this topic ... ]