Paper short abstract:

Once global health data has been collected, cleaned and analysed, it is disseminated through reports, websites and various data visualisation tools. This paper presents an ethnographic approach to studying the social, economic and political contexts of data visualization

Paper long abstract:

Once global health data has been collected, cleaned and analysed, it is disseminated through reports, websites and various data visualisation tools. Well-known examples include the Global Burden of Disease's data visualisations or the work of the Gapminder Foundation, whose tagline is "unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact-based worldview." The production of data visualizations includes researchers, editors, graphic designers, and relies on the human- software interaction. As Vincanne Adams (2016) has noted, metrics work is a form of storytelling. Not only are these stories about the production of data, but they are also stories about a 'reality' that is purportedly told by the data. Once the disease burden has been counted and calculated, it must be interpreted and used - a process which presents ethical and aesthetical questions. The ordering of 'messy' data into graphs and figures promotes a certain truth about the state of global health. Choices are taken on what to visualise and what to leave out. Graphs and figures are disembodied from the socio-political context of data collection, and from the lived experience of individuals represented in the data points.

This paper examines ethnographic moments in the data handling process that offer insight into the social, economic and political contexts of data handling and display.