Nathaniel Tkacz - Being with Data

Over thirty-odd years, the notion of formatting pops up in several places in the work of Latour. In an early co-authored piece with Callon, the two use the concept of formatting in at least three senses in order to develop their own approach to the study of capitalism, markets and economic science (as a discipline). 27They use the idea to describe the performativity of economic categories: ‘the notion of formatting refers to the always ongoing and effective performance of economic categories, which are definitely real as long as they are networked to other mechanisms that not only do not hide them but actively contribute to their reality’. 28They use it to refer to the performativity of the practical methods of economic science:

even the most theoretical economic science is constantly performing this formatting operation, for its work is much more practical, down to earth, and effective than it would admit. Indeed, economic science extracts from the mobilization of people and things the necessary elements to make the exchanges calculable – and it is precisely this set of operations that we have in mind when we use the notion of formatting. 29

And they use it as a way to get at the relation between capitalism and markets: ‘capitalism refers to the formatting of markets’. 30Overall, we get a sense that formatting refers to the ongoing performativity of things. It is the ‘how’ of performativity. It refers to the method of framing some thing or activity in a specific way such that it is amenable to a pre-existing epistemic order (i.e., economic science). And it is used to define how one thing relates to, or acts upon, another.

In later writings, Latour uses the concept once again to highlight the active, performative role of knowledge construction, but now as part of a negative contrast: ‘The notion of “fact,” let us recall, had the disadvantage of not taking into account the enormous work of shaping, formatting, ordering, and deducing, needed to give the data a meaning that they never have on their own.’ 31Here, the idea refers to the active work needed to give data meaning; work that can go unnoticed once something attains the status of fact. Latour tends to use this notion of formatting to point to the practical elements of knowledge construction that are easily overlooked, though not invisible or hidden. Part of what the term ‘formatting’ does, as a verb, is ascribe these practical and mundane elements some force and an active role in the production of realities.

Like Latour and Callon, I too see formatting as a performative notion, able to describe the ‘how’ of one thing’s relation to another. I like the way Latour places it within a context of knowledge production and the overlooked (but not invisible) elements that feed into and define more finished products (like facts). However, my own use is more literal and specific than Latour’s. I want to stick much more closely to the notion of format when I invoke formatting. Formatting refers to the bidirectional performativity of a format as it is enacted (or ‘used’, in more common parlance). It refers to how a format acts on the data and other elements that pass through (and thereby constitute) it and on the people, devices, and organizational time-spaces within which it is deployed. To describe the active work of a format as formatting suggests a specificity to its performativity. Formatting is not a free-for-all; it has limits, its ‘tendencies’ in terms of what it can achieve in any given situation. What a format does is carry along these specificities, limits and tendencies; they are in part what constitute it as a format; they give it its consistency and make it recognizable. Understanding these specificities does not allow us to grasp the entirety of what’s going on when a format is at work (a difficult and questionable aim in any case), but can serve as a privileged point of orientation. It enables contrast and comparison of different empirical instances and permits one to rise up, if cautiously, and posit certain generalities and regularities (carried forth as tendencies in a format) among such instances.

To get a sense of the work of formatting and how significant a format can be to societal-level organization, consider what is in some ways a precursor to the dashboard: double-entry bookkeeping (DEB). While DEB is known as a method for keeping accounts, it also serves as an excellent example of a format (or rather, a number of closely related formats). Consider the striking parallels between how I have defined a format thus far and how DEB is defined by Hans Derks:

a way of organising, arranging, registering accounting data of ventures (public and private) that informs several users, in particular the owner(s), to improve decision-making, to uncover gain/loss, to track the entity’s rights and obligations, to recall past activities, and to achieve a greater control or surveillance of transactions internal and external to the firm or other institutions. 32

As the name connotes, DEB involves entering financial transaction numbers into account ledgers (a format), with every transaction entered twice, appearing as a debit entry in one account (in a leftsided column) and as a credit entry in another account (in a rightsided column). Through entering every transaction as both debit and credit, the system should ‘balance’ and this acts as a safeguard against errors. Ostensibly, DEB involves arranging numbers for the purposes of keeping account. The numbers are arranged and ordered (formatted) through the ledger, and this imbues them with a specific value and meaning. The numbers become ‘accounting numbers’, representing financial values (credit and debit) in the context of business. However, a number of historical studies have shown there is much more to this format.

While the double-entry of numbers is core to this method of accounting, it is but a component of a larger system comprised of different books or journals (typically three). Historically, DEB made use of a daybook, a journal and a final ledger of accounts, and one could approach each as a format in its own right, but for the sake of brevity I treat them together. As the names suggest, each book or journal serves a different purpose within a larger system, moving from more descriptive records of daily transactions (daybook) to more abstract forms of numerical representation (ledgers). In her excellent history of the modern fact, Mary Poovey has argued that DEB played a crucial role in the becoming factual of numbers; that is, in numbers’ capacity to appear beyond matters of interpretation. 33Poovey was precisely interested in this question of how it came to be that some things appear as available for interpretation while others do not, or as she puts it, in ‘how description came to seem separate from interpretation or theoretical analysis; the story of how one kind of representation – numbers – came to seem immune from theory or interpretation’. 34DEB is crucially important for Poovey as it produced a kind of proto-factual form of numerical representation. This type of numerical representation was achieved by the parsing of economic activity through DEB’s system of books and from more detailed to abstract modes of writing numbers. This movement, which Poovey describes as one from narrative to number, imbued these numbers (and their related accounting practices) with specific capacities and a kind of authority. While I cannot convey the full extent of her argument here, Poovey positions DEB in contrast to Ciceronian rhetoric (influential in the late fifteenth century) and shows how the form of numerical representation found in DEB diverged from and challenged this dominant form of rhetoric. That one could move from narrative to number (and back) in DEB, for instance, ‘seemed to make writing transparent instead of performative, as rhetoric so obviously was’. 35She adds, moreover, that DEB ‘helped undermine the epistemology and social hierarchy associated with rhetoric’ by challenging Ciceronian scepticism through its system of representing numbers (that is, through its format). This was observable in the apparent transparency of the numbers themselves, but also, for example, in how DEB enabled ‘writing positions’ 36which were not reliant on the same social hierarchy as that of rhetoric for their authority.