introduce DEB to help flesh out my conception of format (without anticipating the material to come) and to communicate the significance of certain formats regarding the contours of societies past and present. While it would be naive to consider DEB as only a format or number of formats, or to attribute its historical role to the work of formatting alone, it would be equally naive to underestimate the significance of arranging numbers (or code, data, text, images) time and time again and in standardized ways; ways that can travel and insinuate themselves into the routines of daily life, habituating forms of being and knowing, interpreting and perceiving.
DEB also provides an interesting contrast to the dashboard as a format. Like DEB, the dashboard has found a home in commerce and, in particular, the management of large and medium-sized organizations. As we shall see, with at least one of the historical trajectories belonging to the dashboard format, dashboards are presented as a development from mid-twentieth-century accounting, specifically in relation to the rise of ‘industrial accounting’. One finds within the dashboard format a new relation to numbers and data, one that includes not only the financial numbers typical of accounting, but also non-financial numbers and forms of representation no longer in the service of balancing the books or auditing. Like DEB, dashboards are also loaded, or layered, with epistemological and broader cultural significance. If DEB served a rhetorical function, adding legitimacy to commerce (at a time when profit on lending money or ‘usury’ was prohibited) through the production of numbers that were always ‘in balance’, the dashboard too is caught up with technological and managerial ideals. And if DEB provided ‘writing positions’ and accompanying forms of authority derived from its system, so too does the dashboard privilege certain ways of knowing and doing, certain types of organizational arrangements, and certain ways of representing data and numbers. The dashboard is no straightforward replacement of the formats of accounting and I will not speculate as to whether it will attain the historical significance of DEB. The dashboard criss-crosses with accounting in certain historical moments, but also contains within it layers from different historical trajectories and present tendencies that reach far beyond the numerical representation found in accounting ledgers. The dashboard has already been with us for over a century, slowing, stabilizing and recursively adapting to new technological configurations, absorbing the visions of its designers, engineers and the cultures which put it to work in predictable or unexpected ways. If DEB produced a form of ‘noninterpretative’ numerical representation that was able to travel and become a bedrock of modern science, it is not so much the travelling of data in dashboards that is of interest, but rather the travelling of the dashboard format itself.
The notions of format and formatting provide the conceptual underpinning of this study of data and dashboards. They are how I hold the two together (data and dashboards) and inform many of the specific observations I will make about each. As much as this is a study of data and dashboards, it is a study of formats and the work of formatting.
Culture
This is a book about culture. Ordinary, everyday things.45 Saturday morning runs, consumer devices, screens, work, ways of seeing and thinking, ways of being. Things that are easily overlooked because they gradually blend into the status quo without much hoo-ha. In the case of dashboards, this book is about a thing that was once not very ordinary becoming so; and about an ordinary thing in one sphere (transportation) becoming ordinary in others. It is about culture becoming data culture and dashboard culture; about the formatting of culture and the culture of formatting.
How does culture enter the picture? Some points of clarification are needed as there are many possible ways one might bring culture and data/dashboard/format together. Culture or cultural categories can serve as the content of data or what is represented by data, for example, as found in the research subfield of ‘cultural analytics’.46 Much of the work that goes by the name of digital humanities also deals with things that are traditionally understood as cultural, and we could generalize to include any other studies where things deemed cultural are the focus of a data-driven inquiry. One can access and make claims about ‘culture’ through extracting data from the diversity of documents (text, images, links etc.) that characterize our digital society and populate its archives (data centres). In this sense, culture is data’s subject matter, its topic, if you will.
In a very different way, ‘culture’ can be invoked to critique the authority of data, its presentation formats and related algorithmic processes. Here, culture might be contrasted with science, such that data-driven and algorithmic processes are found to contain cultural ‘biases’ related to gender, race, age and other markers of identity. Such perceived biases may be located in the data themselves (e.g., their categories), the methods for manipulating and displaying data, or the institutions and settings within which data are produced. When we invoke culture in this way it is often to reveal problems with data that have not been seen or addressed by those who work with data. There are now many excellent studies that fall into this category.47
What I am interested in, though, is not culture as topic or culture as bias or counterpoint to a presumed scienticity. I am not hoping to discover some hidden elements, a cultural ‘Where’s Wally?’48 among an otherwise technical and scientific mise en scène. And I am not interested in creating a strong contrast between science and culture. The tradition of science and technology studies has taught us to tread carefully with these matters. Rather, and taking my cue from this tradition, I want to treat data and dashboards as culture. A dashboard doesn’t merely contain cultural elements, display cultural data or exist in cultural situations. It is always already a cultural entity. No further ingredients are required; no discoveries of bias, no contrast to science. A dashboard facilitates ways of being – with data, as we have seen – and ways of thinking, alongside ways of relating to time, space and other people and things. It always already partakes in and contributes to certain ways of living. This understanding of dashboards (as everyday/ordinary and facilitating ways of being) resembles something of Raymond Williams’ approach to culture precisely as ‘a whole way of life’.49 Williams’ account of culture is multifaceted and I can’t do it justice here, but it includes traditions passed down and understood as ‘ideals’, works of expressive creativity (‘intellectual and imaginative work’) and a ‘particular way of life’ with particular sets of ‘meanings’, ‘values’ and ‘behaviours’.50 As a ‘way of life’ Williams understood culture as ordinary and lived. When I say this is a book about culture, it is because I am interested in exploring the ordinary, lived experience of dashboards. I am interested in how they alter how we act, how we perceive and relate to things and each other; how dashboards tend towards a certain ‘habit of the mind’ (to use another definition offered by Williams). And, like Williams, I am interested in this relationship between the ‘ideal’ – or what I prefer to think of more basically as things that persist over time – and the ‘lived’ that always negotiates new settlements with these persistent things.
Through their arrangements, displays and processing of data, dashboards produce regularities, routines and habits; dashboards work upon us on this level of lived experience; an altered style of thought or epistemological ratio; a new factor to include among established coordinates; a subtle change in the general atmosphere; a feeling. Dashboards carry along in their format traces of longer cultural legacies, traces which present as tendencies towards specific ways of being. Paraphrasing Latour, a dashboard is culture made durable; it is how certain ways of being persist.51 The challenge, if I may call it that, is to bring forth this cultural specificity, to offer an elaboration of it, and to make visible things that aren’t exactly hidden but may have been overlooked precisely because they are right in front of us, because we use them to see with, or because we have been swept up in competing understandings about how data are transforming our societies.
The development of the dashboard criss-crosses different cultures; it passes through them or settles in; it brings cultures together, while preventing other cultural ties from being forged. As we shall see, it partakes in horse-and-carriage cultures, car cultures, accounting-and-management cultures and
