Project

Data driven management has become a central part of the Danish public sector discourse about digitalization and digital transformation. Well-established ideas that form part of this discourse are, that for the public sector to become truly digital and thus more efficient and more innovative, data must be an integral part of public governance. This implies that not only must new IT systems and infrastructures be implemented and developed and new IT skills and competences brought in, new organizational mindsets and…

Project members: Associate Professor Laura Watts, Associate Professor Luca Rossi, Associate Professor Marisa Cohn Research question: How can fiction and digital storytelling techniques be used to inform government big data practices? Theme: Interventions Partners: All above partners, labs and ETHOS Lab affiliations in Paris, Amsterdam, London and Irvine, California

In the Bodies of Data subproject, we interrogate the emerging politics, policies and practices around personal health data in the Nordic region. Using a central interest in the changing roles and responsibilities for data and its infrastructures, we empirically explore three main themes: The digital longevity and aftermath of controversial events with health data The problematic area of data storage and deletion How new platform-based initiatives to move and store personal health data contribute to changing paradigms of ownership and…

As an organization, the Danish tax administration (SKAT) currently strives to become increasingly data driven. Simultaneously, SKAT is committed to offering data services to citizens, companies, municipalities and other stakeholder in line with Danish government strategies on openness and digitalization. The prospect is to enable other actors to become increasingly data-driven as well. Data and data use thus becomes a significant organising principle in SKAT. Drawing on actor-network theory and an ethnographic approach, the project examines work in SKAT towards…

This subproject interrogates the processes of locating and materializing data through the emergence of the data center industry in Denmark. With a focus on the relations between local government, state actors, and Big-Tech corporations, the project analyses transformations in cultural imaginaries of the future in and beyond the sites where data centers are being located. This includes an attentiveness to questions of energy and infrastructures, as well as the shifting political geographies of data as both stuff in the world…

The smart city currently appears as an object of dreams and desires in the minds of politicians, technologists and to some extent the greater public. This sub-project seeks to understand how the smart city, and the infrastructure development surrounding and constituting it, reconfigure relations between public and private actors. Data plays a central role in this imaginary, a source of potential for innovation by private actors or for improved efficiency of public services. This is evident in projects such as…

The Danish public sector has become more and more reliant upon digital technologies for the last decades. Danish citizens are increasingly expected to be able to serve themselves through digital platforms, taking care of requests, casework and administrative forms of labor previously handled by welfare state professionals. As both datafication and digitalization intensifies, new forms of ‘data’ or ‘digital’ citizenship also start to emerge, reconfiguring and recreating the very relation between the state and its citizens. This subproject investigates these…