Recent buzzes around big data, data science and artificial intelligence portray a data-driven future for healthcare. As a response, Europe's key players have stimulated the use of big data technologies to make healthcare more efficient and effective. Critical Data Studies and Science and Technology Studies have developed many concepts to reflect on such overly positive narratives and conduct critical policy evaluations. In this study, we argue that there is also much to be learned from studying how professionals in the healthcare (...) field affectively engage with this strong European narrative in concrete big data projects. We followed twelve hospital-based big data pilots in eight European countries and interviewed 145 professionals between 2018 and 2020. In this study, we introduce the metaphor of dreams to describe how professionals link the big data promises to their own frustrations, ideas, values and experiences with healthcare. Our research answers the question: how do professionals in concrete data-driven initiatives affectively engage with European Union's data hopes in their ‘dreams’ – and with what consequences? We describe the dreams of being seen, of timeliness, of connectedness and of being in control. Each of these dreams emphasizes certain aspects of the grand narrative of big data in Europe, makes particular assumptions and has different consequences. We argue that including attention to these dreams in our work could help shine an additional critical light on the big data developments and stimulate the development of responsible data-driven healthcare. (shrink)

This paper contributes to our understanding of farm data value chains with assistance from 54 semi-structured interviews and field notes from participant observations. Methodologically, it includes individuals, such as farmers, who hold well-known positionalities within digital agriculture spaces—platforms that include precision farming techniques, farm equipment built on machine learning architecture and algorithms, and robotics—while also including less visible elements and practices. The actors interviewed and materialities and performances observed thus came from spaces and places inhabited by, for example, farmers, crop (...) scientists, statisticians, programmers, and senior leadership in firms located in the U.S. and Canada. The stability of “the” artifacts followed for this project proved challenging, which led to me rethinking how to approach the subject conceptually. The paper is animated by a posthumanist commitment, drawing heavily from assemblage thinking and critical data scholarship coming out of Science and Technology Studies. The argument’s understanding of “chains” therefore lies on an alternative conceptual plane relative to most commodity chain scholarship. To speak of a data value chain is to foreground an orchestrating set of relations among humans, non-humans, products, spaces, places, and practices. The paper’s principle contribution involves interrogating lock-in tendencies at different “points” along the digital farm platform assemblage while pushing for a varied understanding of governance depending on the roles of the actors and actants involved. (shrink)