About

Data were everywhere during the COVID-19 pandemic. People of all ages and professions consulted government dashboards, submitted personal data via apps, and, in research, openly shared scientific data to speed discovery. Now that the pandemic is over, what will happen to these different forms of data and the infrastructures used to collect and store them? Will they be maintained, and will the data be usable in the future?

Starting from practices born during the pandemic, this project explores the sustainability of open data infrastructures, taking COVID-19 data as a case for analysis. It does this using a mixed-methods, ethnographically-oriented approach to examine open data infrastructures at sites within research, citizen science, and governments. While COVID-19 data provides an ideal case to study the dynamics of open data infrastructures, the problem of sustainability is much larger and extends to nearly all types of data.