My new paper examines the history of data infrastructures and how they grapple with absent and incomplete information. Exploring the tension between the desire for certainty and acknowledging partiality, I advocate for recognising the ‘ghosts’ that haunt data systems. doi.org/10.1177/0894...

Ghosts in the Data: The Contested Politics of Absence in Data Infrastructures - Will Orr, 2025

Absences are inescapable in data. Data collection always focuses on some elements while occluding others. Yet, how absences are considered and recorded within d...

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