From Milk to Cow. Reflections on the data governance of Parmigiano Reggiano
Peer reviewed, Journal article
Published version
Date
2024Metadata
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Original version
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS). 2024, 36 (2), 9.Abstract
This reflection note is about cheese.
Over the years, my research has focused broadly on data infrastructures (Monteiro & Parmiggiani, 2019; Parmiggiani & Grisot, 2020). While working with good colleagues and practitioners, I discovered that data infrastructures are a lot about day-to day, mundane, and seemingly inconsequential practice (ibid). When gaining access to cases, my colleagues and I would typically be asked to help with or at least advise on the design, implementation, or evaluation of some digital tool. This could happen as part of an ethnography of the implementation of an infrastructure for real-time subsea environmental monitoring during oil and gas operations (Parmiggiani, 2015), our longitudinal engagement with subsurface exploration and the digitalisation of the work of geologists (Monteiro et al., 2018), or an Action Design Research study of welfare services and ways to better communicate the use of AI to citizens (Schmager et al., 2023). As part of these projects, I began to observe the daily work practices of deciding about, testing, and repairing data and/or instrumentation to solve a particular concern and get operations going in data infrastructures.
Our unit of analysis in research is never neutral but depends on what we look at, which is influenced by what we find engaging. This is something widely accepted in the anthropological tradition (Clifford & Marcus, 1986; Gupta & Ferguson, 1997; see Parmiggiani, 2017 for a review). It was not a surprise, for example, that my university education in computer engineering made me suddenly attracted to the nitty gritty work of tuning and setting up sensors to monitor fish and coral from a seafloor sensor station. In the context of this reflection note, this observation matters because it underlines the importance of the experience in discovering a research theme to pursue on the empirical field. In my case, my interest has motivated a close interaction with professionals in the field (beyond management) to investigate the actual use of technology and negotiations around its design: What should it look like? Why? According to whose interests? These professionals would be my ‘infrastructural allies,’ (Ribes, 2014) whose job is to ask themselves questions that resonate with mine: What work is needed to make this work? Again, this is very familiar to a CSCW scholar, or one influenced by Actor-Network Theory.