Coffee Roasters’ Data Vernacular: On the Entanglement of Digital Data and Craft

Abstract

The symbolic opposition between data/datafication and human perception or reasoning is a key feature of contemporary data discourse. This article suggests analyzing how such dominant ideas about data get articulated in specific contexts. We take the use of computerized data in small-scale coffee roasting as an example of a “data vernacular” that reproduces, uses, but also modifies elements of the dominant data discourse. While data’s promise of efficiency and consistency is taken up in coffee roasting, the data are embedded in the context of a craft whose insistence on the superiority of human senses actively constrains the impact of data. This ultimately adds vernacular voice and variation to the human versus data semantic.