Big Data

3The Status of Computation in Data Sciences

Knowledge based on observation is generally mediated by techniques and tools that make these observations manipulable, intelligible and interpretable. In the natural sciences, observation with the naked eye has given way to instruments that make it possible to see the distant, the tiny and the invisible, while other instruments make it possible to reveal the composition and properties of matter, to test the mechanics of objects or to force signals to manifest themselves. Computation is one of these epistemic techniques, which manipulates not nature itself, but its representation through data in digital format.

In a context of knowledge production, the design and manufacture of instruments are based on theoretical principles that are compatible with this knowledge production: the instruments of mechanics, thermodynamics and chemistry are based on the same laws of nature as the branches of physics to which they relate. While their design also arises from so-called technological research work, their result has the status of an instrument governed by scientific problematics. As in our computational cultural sciences, which we have hypothesized and therorized, the tool is put at the service of the scientific practice, which ensures an epistemic continuity between observation, instrumentation and the theoretical framework. This continuity is a historically and logically constituted norm of articulation between science and technology.