Leonelli proposes the “data journey” as both an analytical unit and a theory of scientific evidence. Data are not raw, stable entities that simply await interpretation; they become evidential through situated practices of collection, formatting, classification, transport, recombination and reuse. A journey may cross geographical locations, temporal moments, epistemic communities and theoretical viewpoints, and each passage depends on material infrastructures, social agency and standards that enable or constrain mobility. The methodological operation is to follow data themselves, reconstructing lineages and transformations rather than assuming continuity from origin to reuse. This makes provenance, context and interoperability central to epistemology. Leonelli’s relational account bridges philosophy of science, STS and data studies by showing that mobility is productive precisely because it can alter meaning while preserving enough epistemic function for an object still to count as data. Reliability is therefore an achievement of well-supported movement, not an intrinsic property of information.
