Posted: January 27, 2021
As digital data continues to rapidly proliferate, sustained by the ever-expanding architecture of the cloud, discussion of “data management” has become ubiquitous. Individuals, institutions, and states are all faced with the onerous work of organizing, culling, and keeping track of their data, raising questions that range from the stakes of self-archiving to the environmental costs of large-scale data storage. This panel proposes a new approach to these now-common problems, asking: does it make sense to talk about data care?
When we center the people tasked with “managing” data in our analysis, questions of relationality inevitably arise. Is something like care at work when a data center technician sustains terabytes of data through his everyday practice, or saves it in the face of natural disaster? What kind of relating is at play in a researcher’s process of ensuring her data set is “clean”? What do intense affects associated with “data hoarding” and data loss (Dow Schüll 2017) tell us about normative expectations of care? By positing care as a flexible center point in this conversation, we aim to dig deeper into the relationships between people and the data they are responsible for.
Topics of discussion may include, but are not limited to:
– Design and maintenance of digital infrastructure
– Questions of data privacy, ownership, and sovereignty
– Emerging frameworks of data health and hygiene
– Non-human and new materialist approaches to data relations
– Gendered histories and practices of data care
Contact: alix.johnson@ufl.edu
Keywords: Data, Care, Data Management, Data Storage, Digital Practice
Published: 03/01/2023