Idiosyncrasies, Forms of Work, and Capital: The Operational Context of Civic Data

Abstract

Successfully making civic datasets accessible to communities involves more than hosting them on a website. There are entire infrastructures that need to be aligned to ensure that those who need these datasets can access them in a timely, usable, and efficient manner. In this article, I use interviews and data ethnographies to unpack the operational context of a community’s civic data. This operational context I describe includes the data idiosyncrasies, forms of work, and capital that I engaged with during the data infrastructuring process. Such an operational context, as Loukissas argues, is a consequence of the settings from which data are extracted, is required to better understand the shortcomings in the data, and can help us draw more accurate conclusions from them. This article serves as a reminder of how data are never raw but are determined by the politics of data economy in which they operate. Such data are bound to the context from which they are generated, where meaning is negotiated by the multiple sociotechnical elements involved. Overall, this article contributes to scholarship about data infrastructures in the field of CSCW and the work that goes into operationalizing them.