Date: February 2nd, Friday 12:00~1:30
Link: https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/
Presenter: Youngrim Kim (Rutgers University)
Youngrim Kim is an assistant professor of Media Studies at Rutgers School of Communication and Information. Her research broadly centers around the role of digital platforms and data-driven systems in relation to statecraft and governance. She examines how state institutions build and utilize digital technologies to manage complex governance challenges, specifically in the context of public health and environmental crises. Working across critical data studies, science and technology studies, and media and cultural studies, Kim investigates how crisis response technologies developed for public interest reconfigure state-society relations in moments of uncertainty and disturbance. Her work has been published in New Media & Society; Information, Communication, & Society; Journalism; and International Journal of Communication, among others. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled, Datafying Risky Bodies: Surveillance Culture and Civic Action in Times of Public Health Emergencies.
Title: Dashboarding the Pandemic
Abstract:
During COVID-19, countless dashboards served as the central media for people to learn critical information about the pandemic. Varied actors, including news organizations, government agencies, universities, and NGOs, created and maintained these dashboards, conducting the onerous labor of collecting, categorizing, and taking care of COVID data. In this talk, I will present two research projects that uncover different forms of labor and data practices—the work of “COVID data builders”—behind the scenes of dashboarding the pandemic.
The first study draws on in-depth interviews with volunteers and practitioners across the United States and India who participated in COVID dashboard projects. Specifically, it examines dashboard projects focused on marginalized and missing COVID data that show the pandemic’s discriminatory impact, including COVID cases in prisons and long-term care facilities, COVID and racial inequity, and deaths due to COVID lockdowns. Investigating how these data builders worked with the always imperfect data of the pandemic, the study reveals that the politics of counting is grounded in the material and affective labor of confronting, navigating, and negotiating with data’s epistemological ambiguities.
The second study is from a chapter of my book manuscript that examines civic dashboards made by volunteers and community organizations in South Korea during COVID-19. Illustrating dashboard builders’ ambivalent stance towards the Korean government’s extensive collection and use of personal data in the COVID response, the study demonstrates how dashboards become a contested site of meaning making where state-society relationships are reconfigured. Ultimately, dashboard builders developed compromised alignments and haphazard collaborations with the state as they negotiate what data should be collected and disclosed for the nation’s health.
BK21 FOUR Free and Responsible AI Media Group
http://bk21comm.snu.ac.kr