Everyday Curation? Attending to Data, Records and Record Keeping in the Practices of Self-Monitoring

Abstract

This paper is concerned with everyday data practices, considering how people record data produced through self-monitoring. The analysis unpacks the relationships between taking a measure, and making and reviewing records. The paper is based on an interview study with people who monitor their blood pressure and/or body mass index/weight. Animated by discussions of 'data power' which are, in part, predicated on the flow and aggregation of data, we aim to extend important work concerning the everyday constitution of digital data. In the paper, we adopt and develop the idea of curation as a theory of attention. We introduce the idea of discerning work to characterise the skilful judgements people make about which readings they record, how readings are presented, and about the records they retain and those they discard. We suggest self-monitoring produces partial data, both in the sense that it embodies these judgements, and also because monitoring might be conducted intermittently. We also extend previous analyses by exploring the broad set of materials, digital and analogue, networked and not networked, involved in record keeping to consider the different ways these contributed to regulating attention to self-monitoring. By paying attention to which data is recorded and the occasions when data is not recorded, as well as the ways data is recorded, the research provides specificity to the different ways in which self-monitoring data may or may not flow or contribute to big data sets. We argue that ultimately our analysis contributes to nuancing our understanding of 'data power'.

Knowing (with) the body: Sensory knowing in contraceptive self‐tracking

“…Here, I build on the work of scholars underscoring the sensory and affective dimension of self‐tracking (Lupton, 2018; Maslen, 2021; Ruckenstein, 2014; Weiner et al., 2020). By detailing how users relate and negotiate different types of data in reproductive self‐tracking, my analysis taps into a new field to explore sensory knowing.…”

The Logics of Invited and Uninvited Material Participation

“…clinicians (Nielsen, 2015;Piras and Miele, 2017;Danesi et al, 2018;Weiner et al, 2020) to either facilitate or avoid particular conversations. This curatorial work is often invisible to clinicians and provides another avenue for patients to pursue their own concerns without directly challenging the authority of their clinicians.…”

“…This paper draws on data collected as part of a 3-year study of self-monitoring, focussing on the cases of blood pressure (BP) and weight/BMI, with this paper focusing solely on BP monitoring. Ethical approval was given by the lead author's institutional Ethics Review Committee and full details of the overall study design and methods can be found in Weiner et al (2020), and Andrews et al (2020). Two distinct data sets are drawn on in this paper.…”

“…While not explicitly referenced, there are hints of this in scholarship relating to how clinical trials of self-tracking technologies work out in practice. These have shown how patients may curate (Weiner et al, 2020) their records in preparation for sharing them with their health care professionals, leaving out or including particular data, (Nielsen, 2015;Piras and Miele, 2017;Danesi et al, 2018) as a way to keep the clinic at a distance or make their own concerns visible or legible (Street, 2012) to their clinicians. Given the 'interactional delicacy' (Stevenson et al, 2019) of participation at the clinic, these practices of curation may help patients avoid or raise particular issues.…”

“…Others had experienced a high reading in the clinic or elsewhere. A few related their self-monitoring practice to general fitness and health narratives, family history or saw blood pressure monitoring as a form of stress monitoring (See Weiner et al, 2020). While our inclusion criteria meant that all participants had acquired their devices independently of the clinic, we found that health care professionals often featured in their interviews.…”