Abstract
We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals and communities. This collection of papers explores how data (and their absences) is figuring in the making of the discourses, lived realities, and systemic inequalities of the uneven impacts of the coronavirus pandemic.
Document Type
Editorial
Publication Date
11-9-2020
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720971009
Repository Citation
Leszczynski, Agnieszka and Zook, Matthew, "Viral Data" (2020). Geography Faculty Publications. 29.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/geography_facpub/29
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Big Data and Society, v. 7, issue 2.
Copyright The Author(s) 2020
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License (https://www. creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work as published without adaptation or alteration, without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/creative-commons-at-sage).