Matthew L. Jones is the James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University. With Chris Wiggins, he is completing How Data Happened, to be published by Norton. How Data Happened tells the story of statistics and data from the eighteenth century to the present, attending ever to the ethical and political changes accompanying the use of data, and the implications for rethinking our world of panoptic surveillance capitalism. His publications on the history of the data sciences include “How We Became Instrumentalists (again): Data Positivism since World War II,” and “Querying the Archive: Database Mining from Apriori to Page-Rank.” He has published two books, most recently Reckoning with Matter: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage (Chicago), which Choice deemed “essential.” He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, among others. At Columbia, he has been instrumental in developing new courses teaching programming and critical computational skills to humanities students, social scientists and journalists, all connecting technical practices with liberal arts curricula.