Data as environment, environment as data: One Health in collaborative data-intensive science

Abstract

This article analyses the operationalization of One Health in the context of data-intensive science in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Building on ethnographic field research and revisiting the lives of a knowledge infrastructure of interdisciplinary collaboration set up online in the early phase of the COVID-19 health emergency, the article develops the notion of “data as environment.” This environment is a contact structure that entangles knowledge systems, subjects, processing tools, and mediated bio-socialities in processes of data-intensive knowledge co-production. Claims for new collaborative approaches between the biomedical, environmental, and social sciences are increasingly marked by the emergence of digital knowledge-making infrastructure that leverages data, knowledge, and expertise from different disciplines and sectors to increase scientific productivity via data-sharing technologies. Yet, digital knowledge-making infrastructures appear self-evident when they are in place, while data are often conceived as inert and disembodied information units separated from social relations of research. The argument that data are an environment expands anthropological thinking on data and digital knowledge-making infrastructures by enlightening political-ethical questions that are at stake in the emerging technoscientific worlds of the Anthropocene.