Looking through the digital data kaleidoscope: introduction to the Research Handbook on Digital Data

Digital data permeating our world today are kaleidoscopic: their form and meaning shift depending on the perspective from which they are viewed. As a guide to the interdisciplinary exploration of digital data, in this chapter we advance a working definition of digital data by identifying their key characteristics and discuss how the data-related phenomena coalesce into an emerging digital data regime. We introduce the digital data stack, a conceptual framework to explore the kaleidoscopic nature of digital data where they simultaneously affect and are affected by institutional, organizational, and technological infrastructures, meanings that the data can convey, practices in which the data figure, policies that govern the data, and the uses of data. Finally, we present the Handbook chapters and organize them into stack layers to synthesize novel features of the digital data regime and to identify avenues for further research on digital data and their kaleidoscopic nature.