Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. We are weekly guide to the

numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

We live in a world where data seems to be everywhere, informing if not governing our

lives, but this wealth of data didn't just turn up overnight. There's a rich history

to be explored about how data has shaped who we are and the societies in which we live.

A new book aims to tell some of this story. It's two authors got the idea after teaching

classes at university. Hi, I'm Matthew Jones. I'm a professor of history at Columbia University

and starting next year at Princeton University. I'm Chris Wiggins. I'm an associate professor

of applied mathematics at Columbia University. I'm also the chief data scientist at the New

York Times. I'd say this came out of a lot of conversations among me, Matt, and various

students over the years. Matt and I had the pleasure of meeting about a decade ago. We

co-developed a curriculum on data journalism, which was taught in the journalism school in 2014,

and thereafter it was really through Matt's excellent skills and abilities as a mentor to

undergraduates that the idea really kicked off. Yeah, and we were interested in the way in which

history could illustrate the set of choices that created the conditions under which our current

moment of data saturation and data decision making came about. Both to understand how it came

about, but also to see ways it might have been different. So we increasingly came to see the history

as a crucial component that was missing in much of the conversation about the kind of data-mediated

reality we're living in today. It's as though data just came from nowhere and actually what was

happening 50 years ago or 250 years ago had nothing to do with it. When of course it has everything

to do with our present moment. Yeah, and one of the things we really want to get at is that

today numbers have this incredible authoritative status in the sciences, and they have incredible

...