From Victorian Statistics to Big Data: Reading Hard Times through Critical Data Studies

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the growing interdisciplinary field of Critical Data Studies (CDS) to read Dickens's novel Hard Times (1854) and show how the novel anticipates contemporary critiques of big data culture, algorithmic government and data-driven decision-making by analyzing its critique of statistical rationalism, utilitarian quantification and the reduction of human experience to numerical data. In this study, based on the theorizing of other CDS scholars like Johanna Drucker, Safiya Noble, Cathy O’Neil and Danah Boyd the ongoing critique of political economy and the epistemological constraints and political implications of datadriven knowledge and social organisation are anticipated throughout the novel and in Dickens's representation of Bounderby's statistical management of labour and Gradgrind's fact-based education system.