The importance of small form: “Minor” data and “BIG” neoliberalism

58 Maggie Maclure Maclure, M. (2013a). The wonder of data. Cultural Studies{:=}Critical Methodologies, 13(4), 228-232. MacLure, M. (2013b). Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 658-667. MacLure, M. (2015). The 'new materialisms': A thorn in the flesh of critical qualitative inquiry? In G. S. Cannella, M. Salazare Perez, and P.A. Pasque (Eds), Critical qualitative inquiry: Foundations and futures.Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Methodology in the fold and the irruption of transgressive data. International journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 10(20), 175-189. Stivale, C. (2008) Gilles Deleuze's ABCs: The folds of friendship. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. 4 THE IMPORTANCE OF SMALL FORM 'Minor' data and 'BIG' neoliberalism Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Anna Montana Cirell, Byoung-gyu Gong, and Marek Tesar Abstract Byoung-gyu: From my perspective, the relationship between data and neoliberalism has been under scrutiny, especially by some critical thinkers for some time now. The proliferation of research on neoliberalism and the rise of BIG data have incurred different terminology usages, which at least partially speak to the problematic role of data in neoliberalism. For example, scholars talk about informational neoliberalism (Neubauer, 2011), datafication (Chandler, 2015), dataphilia (Lambert et al., 2015), the society of metadata (Pasquinelli, 2015), the information society, and the data economy, among other things. Do we need various forms of expression, the power oflyric and poems, to move towards 'data' freedom? Could data function as a free entity that can be recognized as a form of relationality and as a force to resist governmentality? Mirka: I wonder how qualitative researchers could work against dataphilia. How might small form, mundane, and minor data be important and transformative? Anna: Wow. I just want to read the title over and over. The less and little is so much more. But shall you all go further and leave me behind, then please prepare for a bit of the potentialities and possibilities of data that might work to push beyond neoliberal data discourse. Smig! Marek: I am intrigued by notions of resistance to BIG data. It does not have to be BIG resistance.Just a little one, with our daily encounters with all subjects and objects, is fine with me. I would like to see how data become subjects and subjects become data, to treat them with similar ethics and respect that they want to give to the individual subject under the neoliberal ideology. 60 Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, and Tesar A ('data' 1) preface Under the onion skin, neoliberal blanket and behind the Box: Foreshadowing some shadows ofAcademia ** Here onion skins, neoliberal blankets, and cardboard boxes are given different ontological status and as such elevated from the most mundane of objects to that of producing small form and minor data as ethereal cover and guard of nearly overcome doctoral student. Not only do they impart her academic security and safety from intellectual harm, but they mediate openings for critical perspective-taking on our current social shadows of academia (as data?)** if I simply shut my eyes for a really long time, can't I make the world go away? this worked for me last night in a dumpster. I hopped in and was excited to find it pretty empty with my feet planted firmly on solid metal. I stood up tall and steady admiring the cardboard boxes piled up haphazardly high making a brown chunky forest of the place. escaping a meaningless mash-up of endless hours of pouring overly dissertation revisions, I declared myself alive. but in this quiet volcano of solitude soon came the demons. separating out from the sound of my own beating heart and happily humming nerves came approaching voices amplifying to crescendo. I then saw the glowing shine of flashlights reflecting onto the opposite inside wall of the dumpster. times like these either call for a fearless and searching moral inventory of your every yuppified failing or the go-to reactionary impulse of every strung-out celebutante out there: run, fight, kill, plead innocence. yet, an inlpromptu plea was abandoned at the rememberance of my cardboard forest and the night cloaking us into one. so when the lookers came 'With their glowing flashlights to find me and re-chain me to my computer, I simply closed my eyes and hid. after a while, they threw out what they had to (onto me), finished their cigarette, and left. the sound of their dying voices relieved all tightness in my shoulders and my eyes opened to the peace and quiet of onion skins covering my own. but there is no hiding in academia. no one learns much behind a fort of cardboard. instead, you must enter this panoptic regime of sci-fi scholarship \vith eyes wide open and give the performance of a lifetime. your onion skins must be thick and ready to peel away at the first vulnerability. how else to grow new ones? reason tells you that things will never be easy or fair with pervasive morelocks dying to throw trash on you. for perspective, you transform wealmesses into strengths and define yourself by your "weaknengths" - which will soon be all you have left to give. and yet vvith onion skins all peeled away, will you even be human, when all is over ... amid the semi-planetary existence of the cardboard-less ivory tower, I can only wield my every weaknength to climb up the escape ladder and story a less-viewed view of our neoliberal world. though escapism will soon fail me and I will then fall back into thieving my meaning from the stolen dreams of The importance of small form 61 scholarly others, won't it be worth it to waste time in the telling of my eventual descent? yet, does it even matter how we fall if, in the end, we all break? ** I was sitting on the patio in a restaurant by the water. the table and chair I was sitting on were almost identical to the chairs and tables next to me, and to those that they have in other restaurants. my senses were transmitting the 'hard problem' of the neoliberal reality while the radio blasted some kitsch melody pop-rock music that they play in most eateries like this. I saw familiar advertisements of products on the walls, and the bathroom looked the same with its traditional male demeanour. above all, I was surrounded by young people who were similarly dressed, who drank familiar-looking drinks, and who behaved as casually as their contemporaries elsewhere. all of this can function as minor data. but somehow in this boredom of sameness and everydayness, of these encounters with minor data, l was in the centre of my 'hard problem', of merging empiric humanly shaped objects of boredom, and the discursive strive for the adventure of shapes, colours and stories. suddenly the need for minor methodologies and philosophies emerged, to puncture the ability to reveal and name all the events and objects in our limited scope of vision under this neoliberal blanket and the pursuit of BIG data.** Moving along neoliberal discourses and practices Notions of data and methodological practices associated vv-ith data have been .changing, and continue to change, as a result of the neoliberal forces, discourses, and market-driven decision making controlling today's higher education and scholarly practices. For example, Lambert et al. (2015) explained how the efficiency-driven neoliberal desire subsumes the education field by imposing quantification, measurement, and competition [of data). According to these authors, neoliberal pursuance of efficiency incurred obsessive reliance on data, which they call 'dataphilia' or 'data-fetish', and resulted in the marginalization of human in that frame. The story of research became the narrative of the endless search for BIG data. These changes, amongst others, have been particularly notable in the discourses and practices associated with qualitative and post-qualitative research (Denzin, Lincoln, & Giardina, 2006; Denzin & Giardina, 2009; Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; MacLure, 2013). Neoliberal-methodology-machinery has the unique and highly specialized task to produce a particular kind of knowledge, one that preferably reaches and covers all consumers constituting this knowledge enterprise. Data/knowledge enables coverage, coverage produces power, power produces data credibility, credibility leads to data effectiveness, effectiveness to research funding, funding to data/knowledge and so on. However, within this neoliberal-methodology-machinery running on fiscal austerity, only certain type of'data' qualifies as meaningful, valuable, and desirable knowledge. The liberal, market-driven focus on data and fast, efficient, transparent data production has actually morphed away from a jurisdictional emphasis and potential The importance of small form 64 Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, and Tesar status of data per se: to the question of what data do and how do they do what they do; what kind of affect and difference can they produce and for whom? Or what might be some potentialities and possibilities of data that might work both for and against neo-liberalism or possible outside neoliberal discourses. In addition, data beyond neoliberalism call for ontological and epistemological scrutiny and ethical wanderings beyond the duty. As an ontological practice data pose questions of knowledge, subjectivity, relationality, politics, and power. Data are not one thing or somehow simplified production practice but they are connected to different political structures, discursive variations, and multitude of scholarly and linguistic assumptions and connections. Data function and multiply differently in different socio-political contexts. If scholars were capable of departing from neoliberal practices or operating in the liminal spaces between neoliberalism and democratic responsibility they might be interested in different data questions. They might not ask what data are or how do they profit, but how they function beyond production and financial profit, how they resist, deconstruct, counter, transgress, transform, multiply, what they enable and disable, and how they meet the other, the unknown, the strange and yet becoming. Maybe data's different extensions function as discursive apparatuses that can regulate diverse effects of power (Foucault, 1980). Data may not be separated from truth(s), but can they be deliberated and released from the grip of normative science? Alternatively, data can be seen as a productive illusion or at least partially imaginative practice that can create movement in researchers, participants, data's surroundings and diverse political contexts. Data are, in other words, potentially illusive because they may produce them'ielves sometimes in unpredictable and provocative ways. Provocative data also hail for action, change, transformation, and for becoming something unanticipated and other since data are influenced and sometimes completely constituted through discursive practices and within net\vorks of power. We propose that by focusing our attention to the mundane, and minor, to small details, smaller nuances and the smallest differences qualitative researchers might be able to rethink their taken-for-granted practices, reconstruct normative discourses and attend to the Other (in its various and still unforeseeable forms). What happens when scholars stay attentive and sensitive to minor gestures, small differences, and mundane details also of the 'BIG'? Do we still have room for tailored suits, range free eggs, and small form or minor data? Stronach (2009) offers concepts such as 'word-crashes' (e.g., small/big=smig), 'semantic collisions' (e.g., individualistic collaboration, organic methodology, singular plurality) (see Nancy cited in James 2006, 2012), and 'narrative near-misses' (e.g., narratives that are nonrelatedly related) to describe and potentially counter neoliberal spaces and discourses in contemporary/new world. These crashes, collisions, and near-misses might offer powerful counter measures also in relation to data especially focusing attention to ordinary particulars, productive mishaps, seemingly confusing yet prolifically disturbing contradictory details. It is possible, according to 65 Stronach (2009), that prepositions such as 'between', 'with', and 'against' can speak to the question of difference better than overly used nouns. Similarly, contradictory or opposing narratives can indeed mark the difference and create a useful and productive sequence.These narratives "oppose each other like an invisible, unwordable force, a discursive magnetism that at-tracts and dis-tracts the other" (p. 254). How would data function as a preposition such as between, with or against? Smig! Immanent, minor, 'small form' ... data Data beyond neoliberalisrn could be seen as a minor gesture (Deleuze & Guattari, 1986; 1987; Manning, 2016) or data in small form.As a minor gesture, small form and immanent data are always in relation to major (big) data. Manning (2016), mostly drawing from the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead, and Bergson, highlights the importance of minor gestures. For Manning, minor gestures (minor ｾｮ､＠ small-form data) produce variation in the normative organization (e.g., in BIG data). Minor gestures' rhythms are not governed by the norm or pre-existing structures but they are in flux and continuously changing. Minor gesture or 'small form' data are not known in advance but tl1ey are produced in-act and in situ.They are activators, carriers, and allies oflanguage in making and in action. Manning also proposes that minor gesture invents its own value and it does not claim a space (of BIG data) but"space-of-variation" (p. 2):"Minor gestures recast the field, open it to contrast, make felt its differential. They do so by activating, in the event, a change in direction, a change in quality" (p. 23). She continues, "Minor gesture is what activates the work under precise conditions, what makes the attunements of an emerging ecology felt, what makes the work work" (p. 65). Similar to major and minor, small and BIG data are not opposites but they are variabilities of co-composition. BIG data do not govern without small data. Minor data is not resistance against major/ BIG data.According to Manning the importance lies in the techniques that allow singularity to" open the work to its workings to come to the fore" (p. 66). Invention of techniques resist the small data's capture by the major/BIG data. Manning also refers to the usefulness and pragmatics of the useless. Data and its value are created in the act in doing and not inscribed ahead of time. When moving beyond neoliberalism, data are no longer fixed objects but they can be conceptualized as practices with various different purposes. Similar to Nordstrom (2015), who views data as shifting moving assemblage, a moving line (a form of data-ing), we see data as a political and critical move, process, and practice - a practice with democratic attitude and differentiation within discourses of solidarity. Critical data practice relates to doing, knovving, inquiring, producing otherness, interacting, emancipating in ways that generate knm·ving 66 Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, and Tesar differently and thus can address the alternative, foreign, and respond to the strange. Data practices do not repeat the same but they produce indefinite difference. For example, in our recent work with undocumented students, data became a shifting and moving e:lc-periment with a variety of emerging sounds (KoroLjungberg, Hendricks, McTier, and Bojorquez, 2016). Sounds were recorded, found, compiled, and passed around and between authors, including one undocumented student, who then produced their own sounds in relation to those they had heard in the students' interviews and earlier sound encounters. Each iteration ended with a collective conversation that also began the next iteration. Some moments from these conversations gave a pause, created questions, and disrupted the flow of inquiry and exploration. Sometimes the authors produced sounds that they felt related very much to the experiences of the undocumented students (e.g., fabricated conversations between friends at a bar, dads at the park, or political rallies) whereas other times sounds were chosen that had more or less of a symbolic connection with students' experiences. There were also sounds that began to connect with undocun1ented students' stories and experiences in unexpected ways or that we expected to work in one way, but took another. p.23 It might also be productive to consider how data meet the other; other minor and mundane, and also the major.To 'truly' meet the other, data need to stay open and sensitive to diversity, difference, and becoming. When meeting the other, data extend their previous practices and current presences. Data practices such these are in flux and responsive. Drawing from Derrida (1993; 1995), we propose that when meeting the other data take responsibility; they react with immediacy and vvithout knowing and hesitation even when the path is not given. This urgency of data obstructs the fixed horizon of anticipated knowledges and fixed forms. Data's responsibility cannot wait and this responsibility cannot be calculated.What happens to data, where, and when cannot be predicted but these data events must be lived. Living data, in turn, supposes rhythm, patterns, irregularities, and possible forgiveness of the offence of the other unconditional forgiveness. Data practices indefinitely differentiate illustrating simultaneous spectrality (return of a ghost that is not dead or live) and survival (simultaneous continuation and suspension of life). The simultaneous absence (of a small form data) and presence of (immanent) data can be recognized in the work ofLucio Fontana. Fontana produced his first punctured canvases in 1949 by opening surfaces (of paintings) to the void beyond. His futuristic art indicated a move toward anticipation and waiting for the imagined future (and the other) presenting nothingness and illustrating the death of matter. Perforations or holes that Fontana called Attese (expectations) were cuts both in the expressive and narrative sense. These cuts signaled the absence of something The importance of small form 67 in the major; mainly the absence of rhythm and temporality. Minor data relates to major. For Fontana cuts were infinite and they functioned as diverse and alternative dimensions of space that highlighted waiting, nullifying, and also building. Holes functioned as tin1eless void, or wormholes in artistic hyperspaces. Some of Fontana's holes were ornamentally and some regularly arranged, some holes were created from the front, and others from the back of the canvas (see Fontana, 2006b): The Cut is a decisive breach, that furrows and penetrates the symbolic purity of the monochrome, a kind of purifying gesture, and at the same time unambiguous symbol less of a romantic, instinctive or reckless gesture than of a conceptual, configured mental space ... My cuts are above all a philosophical statement, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality. (Fontana, 2006a, p. 23) In his art, Fontana moved from philosophical space of cuts to material spaces. Space was no longer an abstraction but a human and material dimension that had potential to generate pain and terror among other things. Fontana attempted to the form (cut) the sensation of pain and terror, and he aimed to place the observer at the center of the picture enabling the creation of herself through imagination. Fontana also introduced the trans-objectiveness of the painting; physicality of the painted surface and the hole that passes through it.The material behind the canvas was brought into the painting through the cut. Manning (2016) referred to operative cut of the minor gesture. This operative cut opens experience to its future and potential: "The affirmative cut of the minor gesture catalyzes a reordering. Cuts are not good or bad. It is what they do that makes a difference" (p.201). Furthermore, we wonder what could be produced through the focus on uniquely quotidian occurrences or the small form that exist outside the regime of neoliberal scholarship. The new materialist or posthumanist data movement can oiler some alternative possibilities assigning the smaller material details great weight in the construction of our social reality. Posthumanists ascribe purposeful action to nonhuman agents - no matter how minor or small in the detail or object (Barad, 2007; Latour, 1999; Pickering, 1995). Methodological implications of a posthumanist lens de-center and diffuse agency and thus data. Therein, no form of data is given more precedence or weight, as even the less 'prized' data could impart great impulse, transformational force to the research questions and problem at hand. Small, smaller, and the smallest data form and minor data momentum, increase speed, and transform from yeast, stones, laundry; to a clock's minute hand. From this lens, scholars acknowledge the rhizomatic and nonhierarchical relationality between data, which configure our complex network of human and nonhuman agents (Mazzei & Jackson, 2005). Our necessary examination will then take up these posthumanist musings to unravel critical data fragments or narratives wherever they may lead like balls of yarn rolling quickly past us. Data produced through minor gestures, unexpectedly 68 Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, and Tesar and even accidentally is no news. For example, Latour (1999) troubled common perceptions of Pasteur's lactic acid ferment by re-invigorating Pasteur's famous 1957 paper to the new tale of"Cinderella-the-yeast" (p. 115). Latour recounts the ontological blossoming of the everyday yeast as it evolves throughout Pasteur's its own right" paper from an inconsequential by-product to "a full-blown (p. 1 to its final belle-of-the-ball status. The paper's beginning lens steeped too readily in assigned roles of dominating action and passive reaction could never notice the importance of the very entity that would soon stir up a whole bubbling chemical coup of possibility. In simpler terms, this indicates that the evolution of Pasteur's thinking about his data and his resultant breakthrough was dependent upon a de-centering from constraining conventions of privileging BIG data. Similarly; in letting go of presumptions that carve linearity and logical neatness into our data through causal reasoning, scholars may more freely attend to illogical drivers of random data, encounters, and enactments. Freed from value claims, this qualitative researchers to ponder social practices as quotidian and seemingly unguided as children carrying stones (Rautio, 2013). Herein, scholars were allowed to also dialogue an interstice of non-opposing possibilities: the stones, in wielding a certain draw, invited their own carrying and thus problematized the human-centered orchestration of the child's ostensibly autotelic or self-serving aims (i.e., stones simply for the sake of stone-carrying). Attention and openness to these minor data and smaller forms humbled the research agenda by dispelling illusions that anthropocentric part or type of inquiry is grander or more central than the nonhuman when enacting social practices (Rautio, 2013). In posthumanist inquiry, the main vehicle for addressing questions, such as how home is made, is through interrogating the everyday, the understated, and the minute data. Taking up the very icon of ordinary, Pink, Mackley, and ｍｯｲｾ｡ｮｵ＠ (2015) reshaped how we conceive oflaundry in the social world to ask what its ever-presence can bring to the entangled experiences of the home. They examined the common social practice oflaundry out to dry amid a cultural lens and the changing materiality of daily life. In doing so, they questioned how drying laundry indoors could immediately impact the home's built environment, sense of place, and flow of movement through the home as well as broader political issues of energy consumption, environmental conservation, and economic relations. Still other scholars, such as Pacini-Ketchabaw (2012), put into discourse the smaller side of data by examining how we collude with clocks in classroom practices. Pacini-Ketchabaw underscored how a simple shifting of the clock's minute hand can shift the room into that next pre-ordained stage of time/space continuum. From tidy-time to storybook hour, the complex unspoken orchestration between the clock's face, the children's movements, and the teacher's gaze signify an implicit dance of shared rhythm and cohesive expectations (PaciniKetchabaw, 2012).Tensions, however, arose as educators experin1ented with better ways to engage with the clock (rather than being acted on by the clock) in ultimate pursuit of more effective clocking practices. In this rhizomatic relationality, The importance of small form 69 a dynamic mangle of interwoven human/nonhuman contexts unveiled how individual variability (of children and teachers) intermingled nonhierarchically with embedded technology tools (clocks) and everyday practices to shape the ensuing learning and development (Barad, 2007; Latour, 2005; Pickering, 1995). As illustrated in the previous examples, small form and minor data can enable complex, and critical engagements with inquiry, participants, and our environments. Rather than providing answers to the fixed and stable 'dataconcept' we wonder about possible ways in which minor or small form data may produce otherness, can differentiate the same, and diffuse the generalizable. Rather than seeing small forms and minor data listen also Weaver & Snaza, 2016). Even though we acknowledge the powerful presence of neoliberalism in Academia and the role of productive resistance that data in various forms can offer we are hopeful that by challenging taken-for-granted data practices and by engaging with data in creative ways scholars might extend data into unthinkable yet critical dimensions that can speak to the policy and practice differently. It has become clear that under the neoliberal ideology our treatment of various methodological and philosophical traditions allows a productive space within which every tiny branch of each sub-discipline and area of study cries out for its own independence and recognition, conference, society, or at least a special-interest group. And scholars passionately argue for it. Many of these philosophies and methodologies are struggling against the remains of the toxic ruins of modernity. Often, however, they carry on their struggle using means that were provided to them by the very methodologies and philosophies that oppose under the neoliberal umbrella. Scholars thus employ all the rejected ways of thinking - and most of all the philosophies and methodologies that under the neoliberal agenda may be considered minor or even childish and challenge all the dreadful, irrelevant commodities of the positivist and empirical philosophies and methodologies of the BIG data systems. Scholars become part of the global networks they oppose, often uniting under the very subjects, theories and claims that they simultaneously object. They appear as victims and supporters of the neoliberal systems in their institutions; at the same time, they can oppose and challenge these neoliberal structures and BIG data at the same time (Havel, 1985). Scholars thus contrast the technological inventions and methodologies that are employed to simplify if not to speed up the process and the outputs. Under the neoliberal ideology, some qualitative scholars are also compelled to tame and the very purpose of their inquiry. Some of the methodologies that scholars have worked through are still not accepted in many places in the world, and neoliberal thinking has become hostile to local traditions. Neoliberalism and its schemes of funding and focus on BIG data disregard the 'post' and 'new' turns in methodologies, as they need seductive BIG data, often in order to convince local and indigenous tribes that there is ONE useful, important, and correct pathway to govern the human subject. We crave for small form and minor data in our thinking and being, and in our turn to elevate the subjugated subjects, and thus we challenge the toxicity of BIG data. 70 The importance of small form Koro-Ljungberg, Cirell, Gong, and Tesar Finally, rather than asking, Can you tell me about your data?, Derrida encourages us to ask questions about data questions about data beyond neoliberalism and closure. The following data questions refuse to close, quote, punctuate, and structure language. Data are hanging, interacting, intra-acting, creating texts, readers, and themselves. Borrowing from Derrida, Nordstrom, Deleuze, Manning, Foucault, Havel, and many others maybe we could have 'immanent-uncertain-perhaps data' which wouJd transform and keep up not with the possible but \vith the impossible how do we live and meet data in ways that speak to our critical research goals and collaborations around justice difference ethics and equity could differently without defaulting into the sameness the multiplicities within data create an academic community not of consensus but of dissensus puncturing perspectives how to provide and offer 'life support' to data and of the major rescue their pulsating muscle mass and beating heart what if data's productivity is being calculated based on saved souls do data need more realism sweat tears muscle pain heart ache smells of mulch and rotting fish how can we break free from nee-positivist colonizing and/ or oversimplified data practices as well as uncritical forms of data production power/knowledge how could qualitative researchers avoid creating power for themselves as the more "advanced/progressive" voice for justice equity and decolonization whether using traditional, reconceptualized, or whatever is labeled "new" data how do data address contemporary power contexts/material circumstances/lives and the immediate need for transformations and direct action how are forms of human privilege reinscribed vv'ithin the small form and minor data practices/acknowledgements/ wants/ entanglements historically is 1t possible to decenter data in research without creating an environment of post responsibility for justice socially environmentally and to the more-than-human Other and when asks who from whom what and how 71 from what from how Note 1 The very notion, language, and practices associated with 'data' especially in (post) qualitative research have been questioned in various ways, and this chapter will extend the lines of these discourses (see, e.g., Lather & St. Pierre, 2013; Koro-Ljungberg & MacLure, 2013; Mazzei & McCoy, 2010). 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Educational Philosophy doi: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1140015 5 BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR Data entanglements in qualitative research, policy, and neoliberal governance 1 Harry Torrance 'Data' is an increasingly contested term and concept in qualitative research, but its definition and use is also changing in social policy development and public service management. In this chapter, I will explore these parallel and apparently independent developments and argue that, while deriving from different fields and aspirations, these developments have elements in con1Ulon and data is a term now as much applied to and used in political governance, as it is in (what used to be seen disinterested science. Data in the natural and social sciences The term 'data' derives from and is associated •vith observations and ･ｸｰｲｩｭｮｴｾ＠ in the natural sciences and continues to carry the implications and resonance of science for activity in the social· sciences, including qualitative research. The Oxford English Dictionary defines data as "Related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation." (It further notes, for pedants, that in this definition it is "a mass noun" and can take a singular verb.) It goes on to elucidate various compound words and uses including data analysis, data handling, data mining, databank, and so on. Thus, classically, data is inert, passive, 'out there; waiting to be discovered and collected, pre-existing and separate from the scientist who collects it. Moreover, data is not just collected, but categorized in various ways, so that analysis can aggregate and compare 'like with like.' Similarly; when variables are manipulated in experimental situations, data are, in effect, created, but are still regarded as being a property of the interaction of variables, external to the observer. The experimenter changes the independent variable to produce data pertaining to the dependent or outcome variable in question.