Gaps in the gaze: Informatic practice and the work of public health surveillance

Abstract

Many works that may be situated within the interdisciplinary field of Surveillance Studies have described dangerous potentialities associated with the pervasive, IT-mediated merger of once discrete data sets. In effect, these works cautioned about the rise of “big data” before it was named as such. Even so, they share an uncomfortable consonance with euphoric claims about the revolutionary transformation portended by big data. Situating both euphoric and critical accounts of the IT-mediated gaze within a larger informatic ethos — a spirit in the Weberian sense of this term, defined above all by its concealment of the labor that makes IT work — this article argues that discourse on the data-driven, information revolution must be supplemented by a more modest discourse empirically rooted in the everyday, pragmatic realities of IT. Where it departs from well-established social scientific analyses of IT, however, is in its development of a novel concept: informatic practice. Informatic practice may be defined as the sum of labor or activity that materializes information, including, for instance, such mundane activities as data entry. To empirically illustrate some complexities associated with informatic practice, this article discusses process challenges associated with the implementation of a large-scale (or “big”), regionally interconnected public health information system in Ontario, Canada. Informed by science and technology studies (STS) and actor-network theory (ANT), it uses documentary evidence and interviews with 38 key informants to describe informatic practice and to illustrate the mutations—the natural change—introduced into the IT-mediated gaze by everyday, material practices. This complicates both critical and euphoric claims about big data.