The Social Life of Data: The Production of Political Facts in EU Policy Governance

Data presented in European Union documents have a social life of their own; they are collected, analyzed, disseminated, used, and reused. Along the way, data interact with different external elements—economic, social, and political actors, positions, and preferences—transforming their potential for different contexts and meanings. The Directorates-General are significant data actors, involved in both data-gathering and fact dissemination stages of data's social life and controlling the flows of data through the EU. This article focuses on the social life of two sets of data, tracing the evolution of these datasets into political discourses about disaster response and migration, and arguing that data never speak for themselves but rather evolve into facts through networks, which shape official policy discourses.