Our summer term’s second RUSTlab lecture is here. Join us on Friday, May 31st, from 10-12 hrs (German time) on campus or live on Zoom! You will be hearing Klaus Høyer (University of Copenhagen) on “Re-placing data: Intensified data sourcing in healthcare and the urge to share data across borders”.
For more details visit our website at https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/lecture-by-klaus-hoyer-on-re-placing-data-intensified-data-sourcing-in-healthcare-and-the-urge-to-share-data-across-borders/.
Location: on campus (MB 4/165) and Zoom
Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/RUSTlab
PW: RUSTlab
Abstract:
On March 30th, The Economist had a special issue on data outlining what it takes to realize the proclaimed potential of digital technologies. The issue featured an interesting trope, namely the dream of having “All the data from everywhere all at once” (p. 10). This particular formulation has an uncanny resemblance to the award-winning movie ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022) about a pressured woman feeling forced to tackle everything everywhere all at once, and who is sucked into an ontological multiplicity where what happens in one world has life and death implications in other worlds, and where powerful forces struggle for ultimate control. In this talk, I will explore the trope of having all data available in total compression of time and distance. I will suggest that it too comes about as a result of powerful forces, and that it can indeed lead to a form of ontological multiplicity, albeit of a very different nature from that suggested in the movie. I describe the impact and effect of data integration initiatives over the past decades in Denmark and relate these experiences to current cross-border data initiatives. One could say that these initiatives aim to exonerate ‘place’. However, they make data operate in several places at once, and this does not absolve place – it reconfigures the places in which data are to do stuff and ‘replace’ in the sense of substitute, their effects in unpredictable ways.