Ontography of Data

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent’s work has contributed not only deep and varied empirical insight into the history and philosophy of technoscience, but also engendered methodological approaches to the study of science and technology in society that continue to serve new generations of scholars. This essay identifies the affordances of the “ontographical” method that Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve develop and deploy in their 2018 volume now translated as Carbon: A Biography (Polity Press 2024). “Ontographie,” combining “being” (onto-) and “writing” (graphie), brings together “essence,” “life,” and “writing” and investigates their interplay and analytic potential in the case of carbon. As a method, ontography invites analysts to understand what an entity “is” beyond its chemical properties. Instead, it opens the possibility to know the entity through the forms of life (material and normative) it has taken on and produced over time, thus identifying essence to be emergent, relational, normative, and bound to narrative. This essay shows how ontography can help analysts of human contexts and consequences of data to do critical work to recognise the liveliness of scientific and technical entities like data and their embedding in the making of norms, practices, and conditions of possibility according to which people live.