Data As Curation: A Design Perspective on Bias in Care Documentation Practices

PhD defence by Tina Westergaard Milbak

Assessment Committee

Associate Professor Tariq Osman Andersen, Department of Computer Science (DIKU), University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Professor Helena M. Mentis, Drexel University, College of Computing and Informatics
Associate Professor James Auger, École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay (ENS) and the Centre de Recherche en Design (ENS/ENSCI Les Ateliers)

Supervisors

Associate Professor Naja Holten Møller
Professor Thomas Troels Hildebrandt

Department

Department of Computer Science

Place

Building: NEXS, Room: Store Auditorium, Nørre Allé 53, 1st floor, 2200 Copenhagen N

Email address to gain access to the thesis: twm@di.ku.dk.
You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy.
Recipients of copies of the thesis are not allowed to share or distribute it due to copyright compliance.

Short description of the thesis

The PhD thesis investigates how healthcare data is produced through documentation practices and reconfigured as Generative AI begins to participate in them, with consequences for how healthcare technologies are designed. Across three empirical studies, the thesis shows how data takes shape through situated reasoning about what to document - or not - and thus what aspects of care come to count as data. The thesis introduces curatorial mediation to describe how practices of actively managing data intervene in what becomes representable and actionable as data across sociotechnical contexts. This offers a design-oriented lens for examining how care becomes data, and in what ways bias may emerge. Methodologically, the thesis develops a design ethnographic approach using speculative probes to explore emerging healthcare AI before it becomes established in practice.