The making of the datafied web: media friction, CD-ROMs and institutional data practices

This article analyses the material arrangements and institutional contexts through which data practices became workable in concrete settings before and alongside the rise of the web. It explores how media formats, infrastructures, costs configured the ways data could be stored, circulated, stabilised and authorised. It examines the Publications Office of the European Union, the official publisher of the Official Journal, legal texts and information, as a site where issues of storage, authority, durability and access were negotiated across multiple media. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, paper, CD-ROMs and emerging web-based systems coexisted. Before turning to this case study, the article first revisits the discursive and practical relationship between CD-ROMs and online systems in the years preceding and surrounding the early web. Combined with our case study it highlights how media friction structured early data practices and shaped the conditions under which the datafied web could emerge and develop.