COVID Dashboards became ubiquitous in 2020-2021. Thousands of competing and complementary displays—including official, government-backed, public health dashboards, large volunteer tracking projects, academic efforts, activist interventions, and many others—dotted the landscape. All these systems presented particular views of the pandemic and offered different ways to interpret the unfolding public health crisis. In this talk, we discuss our COVID Data Infrastructure Builders project, which examined the people, assumptions, and resources that came together to create and maintain these systems. We highlight the challenges and difficulties faced by those involved in the provision of these critical data infrastructures—we call these workers “COVID Data Infrastructure Builders.” At first blush, COVID dashboards appear to be ad hoc pandemic improvisations: projects built on the fly to serve a pressing public need. But closer examination revealed a more telling picture. COVID dashboards were always built on a foundation of preexisting resources. Tools, relationships, and institutions provided the foundation for these novel data projects. Maintaining these projects was at times a herculean task; it involved continually marshaling and organizing resources. We discuss how insights drawn from studying COVID-19 dashboards provide lessons that are relevant for not only public health projects, but apply more generally to large data projects.

Speakers' Info:

Megan Finn is Associate Professor at American University, Washington D.C. Her work examines relations among institutions, infrastructures, information, data, and practices in the mediation and making of publics.

Janaki Srinivasan is Associate Professor in Digital South Asian Studies at the Oxford Internet Institute and Oxford School for Global and Area Studies. Her research examines the political economy of information technology-based development initiatives.