For any sufficiently complex dataset, the idea that ‘the data speak for themselves’ is implausible; developers and analysts select from a wide variety of mathematical and visual methods to make the data speak, to filter, arrange and summarize them from different angles, following questions that orient how they look at them.

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‘…[m]edia are not only devices of information, they are also agencies of order’ in the sense that they support and organize social, political, and economic systems in specific ways.

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Information ordering techniques become engines of social order when they operate and intervene in such environments, where ‘[t]hey may change social relations but […] also stabilize, naturalize, depoliticize, and translate those into other media’.

Bernhard Rieder

Rieder, B. (2020). Engines of order – a mechanology of algorithmic techniques. Amsterdam University Press.