data not found

“I have been trying, for about the last twenty years, to link the following three dimensions: lived experience, technologies […], and silences.” - Susan Leigh Star

“‘Missing data sets’ are the blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated. Wherever large amounts of data are collected, there are often empty spaces where no data live.” – Mimi Ọnụọha

data not found is a dataset of datasets that were sought but not found on data portals around the world.

Archiving unmet data desires and lingering concerns, it invites reflection on which datasets are not collected or made public, and which kinds of questions remain unanswerable as a result.

Rather than assuming a “data universalism”, these queries reveal some of the different ways in which data comes to matter.

What is considered “missing data”, a “data gap” or a “data void” is contingent, relational and situational.

You can find it here and read more about it here.

data not found grew out of research for Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025). It was also featured in a paper on the politics of data portals and in CURSOR, a cyberfeminist micro magazine.