ABSTRACT
Documentary has, in varying ways and to varying degrees, always been in the data business. The mass collection of data, the use of found data, and the search for patterns as a way of revealing realities otherwise repressed by dominant social forces suggests the value of data as a means by which to challenge official knowledge. Documentary practice is grounded in the simultaneous production and visualisation of data. The data value of the image underpins Fredrick Wiseman’s view of the image as ‘unanalysed data’ and documentary makers as field workers with ‘a camera instead of a notebook’. Data are bound up with questions of epistemology. The systematic gathering of social data, which began in the late eighteenth century and continued throughout the nineteenth reflected growing concerns about social problems, particularly poverty, and a desire to understand and deal with them ‘scientifically’. Mass Observation differed in fundamental ways from earlier generations of research into social issues.
