Bitemporal Data

Afterword: Reflections on Mindfulness and Bitemporality

This book began with a quotation from T. S. Eliot which expresses a Buddhist awareness of time. That Buddhist awareness of time is often called “mindfulness”, which is a translation of the Sanskrit word smrti, which is also translated as “remembrance”. In the latter sense, we have an immediate connection to data, since data is what we write down in order to be reminded of what we originally had in mind.

Mindfulness is an awareness in which the familiar distinctions of past, present and future seem an almost arbitrary construct imposed on our temporal experience. An example is provided by the anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf, co-creator of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that our linguistic and ...