This is hardly surprising, given that the connotation of data in the contested aphorism – as part of processes of data collection, data acquisition, or data hygiene – emerges with specific methods of social science and computer science which do not develop until well after Twain’s death.
Another strong indication that this aphorism is apocryphal is that association with Twain does not appear until long after the author’s death. The earliest attribution I found was in the computer science magazine Interfaces in 1986. Even in this case, and in several others like it from the 1990s, the authors acknowledge the uncertainty of their attribution, saying “Twain is reported to have said.”
But the circulation of the aphorism is much older than its attribution to Twain. The earliest printed version I found was from a Quality Control Conference handbook from 1966, while an automotive industry consultant refers to it as “a 1970s expression,” as though it was a kind of business cliche of the era.
Robert Rodin, the CEO of Marshall Industries, a manufacturer of semiconductors and other small parts for computers and other electronics, makes the aphorism a centerpiece of his 1999 memoir, Free, Perfect, & Now, and attributes it to Michael Tveite, a very successful management consultant of the 1960s and 1970s. Both Rodin and Tveite are disciples of the influential management theorist W. Edwards Deming.
Deming wrote, in an essay title “On A Classification of the Problems of Statistical Inference,” published in 1942, while he was working for the U.S. Census,
Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any.
W. Edwards Deming, 1942
