The Long History of Digital Epidemiology
Content
Epidemiological reasoning based on data and models
The project illuminates historical developments in biomedicine and epidemiology that led to the emergence of an epidemiological reasoning based on data and models, rather than doctors’ diagnoses and the mere counting of cases. The project shows what influence practices of abstraction and formalization in the history of epidemiology had on today’s digital health landscape. The project refers to new data practices, organised around the idea of digital phenotyping, but also asks how traditional classification practices are newly mobilised in computational epidemiology. Of particular concern is finally how principles of interoperability have given rise to the field of digital epidemiology, in which all kinds of digital traces are presumed to enable epidemic insight or pandemic intelligence.