Iris Tabak

The COVID19 pandemic offers an opportunity to inspect how people make sense of the world with data in their everyday lives. Using a theoretical framework based on the construct of figured worlds, we conducted think-aloud interviews to study the ways people narrate their routines with data during the pandemic. The analysis enabled us to characterize people’s constructions of their agency as interpreters of data; the ways they manage the uncertainties of data; their data-mediated judgements and decisions during the pandemic. These constructions of agency and identity in a data-infused world help us understand both how we learn about the pandemic with data, and more generally, how data mediates our learning about the social world.