In this photo essay, I explore how different kind of civic data infrastructure support efforts to improve environmental public health and governance. Civic data infrastructure, in my reading, is infrastructure that enables collaborative effort to advance the public good. As an anthropologist, I’m interested in how people design, access, use and think about the value of such infrastructure, especially in effort to address problems that resist representation and public recognition. I’m also interested in understanding infrastructural gaps -- gaps between available and needed data infrastructure. A key method for this work is ‘data ethnography,” a method in which one looks for data resources in a particular problem domain in order to understand the data infrastructure in that domains (and its gaps) -- pointing to design possibilities. In this work, I follow Sánchez Criado and Estrella (2018) in casting anthropologists as designers, curators and collaborators.
Description
