Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future

Jer Thorp’s analysis of the word “data” in 10,325 New York Times stories written between 1984 and 2018 shows a distinct trend: among the words most closely associated with “data,” we find not only its classic companions “information” and “digital,” but also a variety of new neighbors—from “scandal” and “misinformation” to “ethics,” “friends,” and “play.”

To live in data in the twenty-first century is to be incessantly extracted from, classified and categorized, statistic-ified, sold, and sur...