Interfacing data destinations and visualizations: A history of database literacy

Abstract

I look at journals and popular magazines on computers and information systems from the early 1970s through the early 1990s to see how they construct expertise about databases and address various publics with different “database literacy” levels. During this period, emerging database technologies such as relational database models and menu-driven interfaces made it possible for users to keep a distance from their data. Alongside such technical changes, socially constructed discourse distinguished “information” from “data” and experts (including computer programmers) emphasized that data was too enormous and unwieldy to be handled by common users and prescribed that such users should concentrate on working with information; that is, data processed by the database management systems (DBMSs). By tracing the socio-technical forces that created data–information categorizations and the dynamic interfacing role played by DBMSs, the article attempts to understand how we arrived at notions about where and how our data are stored.