Everyday Adventures with Unruly Data

Feinberg (information science, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) states that readers are confronted with data in their everyday lives, sometimes in the most ordinary of ways: questioning numbers on a scale, analyzing a package of butter, navigating within a foreign setting, or even a trip to the library places data front and center. In this volume, the author explores data from the human element and not from the perspective of a data or systems analyst. There are seven chapters labeled and centered on a specific aspect encountered by the author: Serendipity, Objectivity, Equivalence, Interoperability, Taxonomy, Labels, and Locality. Chapters are divided into two sections: a main essay describing her personal adventures with data and how the author came to understand this experience; and a second essay with a reflection on the adventure through the lens of her scholarship work within information science.