COVID Dashboard Endings: What Stays and What Decays

For many publics the COVID-19 pandemic was mediated by spreadsheets, dashboards, and other data displays. These COVID data projects were integral to how some people made decisions throughout the pandemic.

Our transnational India-USA based research team focused on the workers who made these COVID data projects happen. But much like life, the only certainty about data projects is that they will one day die – and the COVID data projects we studied ended. This paper draws on interviews conducted in 2021 with over 75 people who were involved in building 17 different COVID data projects for non-expert publics and infrastructure analysis of the projects. Through our analysis, we develop analytical insights for analyzing temporary, fleeting, decaying, data projects and what their decay generates.
    
In this talk, we will examine how two of these COVID data projects (CODD-K in India and CTP in the US) ended and what remains of them. We draw on existing literature to categorize the different kinds of ends of projects and how the participants ultimately judged these efforts against the political aspirations of their projects. The COVID data projects started as implicit and explicit critiques of the decaying and unprepared state pandemic response apparatus. As hubs of intense activity for people who wanted to “do something” to help and also had the resources to do so, the COVID data projects attempted to patch the work of the state.

The projects required enormous efforts, and people poured hours of their time into making them and then into updating, maintaining, and repairing them. However, the projects were always precarious, relying on donated time, money, and software, so the moment that people stopped the processes of making and remaking the COVID data projects, they started to decay. One case, CODD-K illustrates what the ruins of most of the COVID data project websites looked like as they deteriorated over time as data stopped being updated and libraries were not supported and eventually domains shuttered. What remains today are haunted datasets on Github, papers written with these datasets, and the decrepit state that the project critiqued to begin with.

At the other end of the spectrum is the CTP project, which carefully choreographed their project sunset, ensuring their data remained, but also trying to ensure that the data was not haunted – they attempted to create the perfect archive, capturing exhaustive detail about how every piece of data was collected including extensive oral histories with project members, and documentation of their work that is embargoed into the next century. The data and project documentation remain, but so too is a state unfixed and utterly unprepared for another pandemic.