I was recently discussant for a TAG conference session on Data Activism (session 14) organised by Jeremy Foot, Joana Valdez-Tullett, and Stu Eve, all of Wessex Archaeology. Their session abstract expressed some dissatisfaction with the current uses to which archaeological data are put and challenged participants to consider a host of questions surrounding our use of data: what more we could do with it, why we might want to do more, and what stands in our way. Their call attracted an interesting variety of papers, ranging across data reuse cases (and associated problems), the sustainability problems associated with unexpected datasets, issues of comparability between different datasets with differing underlying data strategies, the unexpected application of data to unanticipated research questions, and different ways of perceiving and representing temporal dimensions in imagery, for instance.
Reading the abstracts and listening to the papers, it seemed to me that underlying this broad range of issues and approaches were questions relating to our relationships with data and the consequent implications for knowledge creation. From my notes on the presentations, I identified three key areas: