Borgman’s Big Data, Little Data, No Data examines data as scholarly infrastructure rather than as a neutral substance circulating freely through networks. Its iconic idea is that data are plural, situated and uneven: big data, small data and absent data each pose different problems of preservation, attribution, interpretation, sharing and reuse. The theoretical contribution lies in connecting knowledge production to cyberinfrastructure, disciplinary practice and information policy. Methodologically, Borgman moves across sciences, social sciences and humanities, analysing data practices through cases, definitions, metadata, provenance, communities, incentives and standards. Its conceptual operation is infrastructural scholarship: data are treated as objects embedded in labour, institutions, technical systems, value regimes and temporal commitments. The bridge to the wider field connects information studies, STS, digital humanities, open science and research policy, showing that data-intensive scholarship depends on social agreements as much as on computational capacity.
