Description
The Covid-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University is not only an iconic representation of the pandemic but was widely regarded as a trustworthy and up-to-date source of information on which governments, individuals, and industry could base decisions regarding the dynamically evolving health emergency. In this paper I focus on the dashboards self-description as “real-time” in relation to its global scope. What does it mean to assemble a global epidemic situation “in real-time” and what frictions arise between worldtime and real-time? Based on 26 expert interviews, among them one with the creator of the Johns Hopkins Dashboard, as well as document analysis, I reconstruct the infrastructure through which the global Covid-19 case count was assembled and investigate its temporality. I lay out the temporal unevenness of the data and reconstruct the complex decisions required to harmonize diverse rhythms from biological, administrative, and technological systems into coherent and useable data products, such as daily case counts. This analysis demonstrates how the endeavor to represent and make actionable the global health emergency relied on managing and eventually obscuring the temporal disparities that exist within the data assemblage. Given the growing enthusiasm for global real-time dashboards, not only in global health, this paper sheds light on the critical temporal challenges involved in assembling and interpreting global situations.
