The article builds on the work of Derrida and Foucault to argue that data curation practices in social science quantitative research data are not merely neutral techniques but are perfomative as in these practices are constitutive of the very data that is being preserved. Therefore, data curation practices are historically and culturally constitutive practices that are based on specific cultural assumptions which constructs the notion of ontological divide between data and context and the assumption that representational practices such as data curation have no effect on the contruction of the material world or the context in which it is understood. The article argues that the approach towards understanding data curation practices should move away from representational lines towards engaging with them as being constitutive of their very objects of study and the knowledge that is produced. Therefore archival practices, in particular data curation ones, produce their own reality and knowledge, as priviliged topologies and by the process of naturalizaing and erasing the fact that these are privileged topologies.
What is the main argument, narrative, or e/affect
The authors argue that the making of an archive is an act of power, which influences the structure and content of the archive—data—itself. According to Mauthner & Gardos (2015), “Data curation and archival practices… can be understood as historically—and culturally—specific and contingent ‘metaphysical practices that necessarily enact specific metaphysical commitments to the exclusion of others’” (p. 156). By this they mean that archives consist of both the processes of memory-making and forgetting. Citing Derrida (1995), the authors claim that aside from the positionality of the archivist, the normalized processes of data curation within a given society, “privilege” certain perspectives (concepts and categories) within an archive and naturalize the forgetting of how archives are situated according to these specific “ontological and political commitments” (p. 158). In particular, Mauthner & Gardos (2015) focus on three data curation practices 1) data cleaning 2) data anonymization 3) metadata preparation and demonstrate how these processes perpetuate subjectivities that ultimately affect and situate the archival data they create.