doi.org
Data Trials: Work, Worries and Care Behind the Scenes of a Data-Driven Pandemic - Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
In many countries, the data logistics dedicated to generating a national overview of public health were profoundly destabilised in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the case of France, this article shows that the (re)centralisation of public health data that took place during these times was far from a top-down initiative. It unfolded in a great variety of sites in the health administration where many people developed an affective relationship with the data they manipulated through daily, and sometimes very mundane, interventions. To highlight frictions, worries and care practices that multiplied in this process, the authors identify what they propose to call three “data trials”: infrastructural, representational and enunciative. These trials shed new light on what has often been described as a data-driven pandemic. Far from technically and epistemically stabilised entities, data were subjected to numerous costly and uncertain operations, carried out by a large number of workers who acknowledged and took care of their fragilities.
