Afterword – Crafting Data, Crafting Worlds Across Disciplines

This special issue draws from the AAA panel ‘Entangling data while entangling disciplines: discussing the future of anthropological collaborations with data scientists’. It deals with experiences of anthropologists who have collaborated with data scientists. To render the panel truly interdisciplinary, the organizers of the AAA panel invited a data scientist as discussant, Katie Amato. Below her comments have been elaborated in the form of a dialogue with anthropologist Roberta Raffaeta. This afterword aims to sketch some paths of reflections about what data scientists think of collaborations with anthropologists. The dialogue starts by discussing the tension between reductionism and complexity in technoscience. It links to the role of authority and credibility in times of post-truth- This develops in a proposal for an interdisciplinary art of data analysis in which the conventional concept of ‘context’ (with an example about race and racism) is redefined. The dialogue ends with a discussion on reality and scale.