Gitelman’s edited volume begins from a deceptively simple provocation: data are never raw. Its iconic idea is that data are always generated, selected, cleaned, formatted, named, stored and interpreted within historical and disciplinary conditions. The theoretical contribution is to displace the mythology of neutral information by showing how data are imagined as data before they can function as evidence. Methodologically, the collection works genealogically, moving across scientific records, abolitionist databases, card indexes, dataveillance, long-term studies and media histories to expose the cultural labour behind informational facts. Its conceptual operation is data historicisation: the apparently given unit of knowledge becomes a constructed artifact with protocols, exclusions and epistemic styles. The bridge to the wider field links media studies, STS, information history, archival theory, digital humanities and epistemology, making data critique central to any account of contemporary knowledge infrastructures.