DataSpace Lecture Series: Data Validation: The Infrastructural Configuration of ‘Femtech’ Health Data as Assets // Kean Birch
Everybody is welcome!
Abstract
Kean Birch (with Chris Moure, Jennifer Pybus, and Xiaohui Yu)
Digital data is produced; we can agree on that. How it is produced entails a whole set of other questions and implications for how we understand what digital data is and what makes it valuable. In this paper, I examine health data from ‘femtech’ startups in order to unpack how the infrastructural configuration of digital health data transforms that data into a valuable asset.
A key element in this process is the validation of health data as a particular kind of political-economic, ethical, and regulatory object – all of which underpin its value. Health data has to be configured in a particular form that can be shared, entailing aggregation and de-identification; it also has to be validated as meeting ethical standards and regulatory that are often specific to organizational and national contexts.
Validation is critical as it enables the production of ‘robust’ and ‘useful’ data that can both travel across and within organizations and countries, thereby constituting an important dimension of the valuation of new data product, services, and markets. Concomitantly, however, validation entails a range of possible market and governance overflows that can undermine the value of the produced data.
Kean Birch is Professor at the Department of Science, Technology & Society at York University, Toronto in Canada, where he also holds the Ontario Research Chair in Science Policy. He is a Visiting Professor at Copenhagen Business School (CBS).
In his research, Kean examines processes of assetization, the processes through which things such as knowledge or personal data are transformed into assets.
He is author of several books including “Data Enclaves” (2023), “Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism” (2020; edited together with Fabian Muniesa) and “Neoliberal Bio-economies? The Co-construction of Markets and Natures” (2019).
About the DataSpace Lecture Series: The DataSpace Lecture Series is a series of lectures aiming to convene scholars and academic voices on health data, data infrastructures and related concerns about representation, power, and political economy. In the autumn semester, more lectures will follow. The series is organized by the DataSpace Research Group in collaboration with the Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies (MeST).