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Indexing, Coding, Scoring: The Engine Room of Epidemiology and its Routinized Techno-Digestions

Indexing, Coding, Scoring: The Engine Room of Epidemiology and its Routinized Techno-Digestions Epidemiological data work is a key site to study the configurations of health knowledges and politics. In this article, I ask how new ‘big data’ approaches and datafication in society are about to reshape orderings related to technologies, health, and the body, as well as epidemiological research itself. Diffracting practices with data contributes to our understanding of how data, numbers, and bodies fold into each other in the era of digitalization. Focusing on indexing, coding and scoring I analyse the reconfigurations of epidemiological data infrastructures with the increasing ‘datafication’ of social interactions. I examine a shift in practice from what I call ‘controlled epidemiological calculus’ to accelerated practices of routinized ‘epidemic indexing’. This shift has given rise to a novel mode of automated and largely invisible effects, which I analyse in terms of a digital ‘techno-digestion’. This techno-digestion impacts on how bodies are known and done, on the formation of health policies, and on the constitution of corporealities. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Somatechnics Edinburgh University Press

Indexing, Coding, Scoring: The Engine Room of Epidemiology and its Routinized Techno-Digestions

Somatechnics , Volume 9 (2-3): 21 – Dec 1, 2019

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References (35)

Publisher
Edinburgh University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Edinburgh University Press
ISSN
2044-0138
eISSN
2044-0146
DOI
10.3366/soma.2019.0281
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Epidemiological data work is a key site to study the configurations of health knowledges and politics. In this article, I ask how new ‘big data’ approaches and datafication in society are about to reshape orderings related to technologies, health, and the body, as well as epidemiological research itself. Diffracting practices with data contributes to our understanding of how data, numbers, and bodies fold into each other in the era of digitalization. Focusing on indexing, coding and scoring I analyse the reconfigurations of epidemiological data infrastructures with the increasing ‘datafication’ of social interactions. I examine a shift in practice from what I call ‘controlled epidemiological calculus’ to accelerated practices of routinized ‘epidemic indexing’. This shift has given rise to a novel mode of automated and largely invisible effects, which I analyse in terms of a digital ‘techno-digestion’. This techno-digestion impacts on how bodies are known and done, on the formation of health policies, and on the constitution of corporealities.

Journal

SomatechnicsEdinburgh University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2019

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