Sampling and sense making: data journeys in the clinic

• In Event: Unpacking The “Datafied” Society: Shifting Politics of Seeing and Knowing - II

Abstract

Scholars have sought to understand the processes of turning the body into data, which have bearing on how quantifiable information is generated, the logics by which it is analyzed, integrated, and read, ultimately constituting the implicit framework within which medical meaning emerges. The practices of numbering which are based on different assumptions, the manner in which numbers are bundled together and then acted upon algorithmically is an important concern in health data, particularly in relation to understanding what we may call “data journeys” (Bates, Liu and Goodale, 2016). This approach, deriving from an STS perspective and drawing on Actor-Network Theory, calls for us to locate critical data studies in health and other fields within contexts of data production, transmission, agglomeration and analysis, if we are to understand how it constructs and informs the “data gaze” (Beer,D, 2018), and how meaning shifts as the data move from interpretive field to another. This paper explores these data journeys from the point of extraction/abstraction from the embodied individual through the laboratory or diagnostic service to the clinician, to understand the ways in which meaning is produced, reproduced, interpreted and finally applied back to the understanding and management of the body.

Author

• Usha Raman, University of Hyderabad