Social Life of Data Analytics
My main research examines the social life of biomedical data, following data artifacts from scientific and policy investment through integration in everyday practice. I have published a series of articles on electronic health records and data standardization from inside US clinical settings; more recently, I have studied the social lives of COVID-19 data by following surveillance reports in their circulation outside of the hospital and lab.
Featured Publications
Taylor M. Cruz. 2024. “Racing the Machine: Data Analytic Technologies and Institutional Inscription of Racialized Health Injustice.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 65(1): 110-125.
*Winner of the Ida B. Wells-Troy Duster Award, ASA Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology
Taylor M. Cruz. 2022. “The Social Life of Biomedical Data: Capturing, Obscuring, and Envisioning Care in the Digital Safety-Net,” Social Science & Medicine 294: 114670. [Open access]
Taylor M. Cruz and Emily Allen Paine. 2021. “Capturing Patients, Missing Inequities: Data Standardization on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity across Unequal Clinical Contexts, ” Social Science & Medicine 285: 114295. [Open access]
*Winner of the Donald W. Light Award for Applied or Public Practice of Medical Sociology, ASA Section on Medical Sociology
Additional Publications
Taylor M. Cruz. 2023. “Data Politics on the Move: Intimate Work from the Inside of a Data-Driven Health System,” Information, Communication & Society 26(3): 496-511.
Taylor M. Cruz. 2022. “Shifting Analytics within US Biomedicine: From Patient Data to the Institutional Conditions of Health Care Inequalities,” Sexuality Research & Social Policy 19: 287-93.
Taylor M. Cruz and Sheridan A. Smith. 2021. “Health Equity Beyond Data: Health Care Worker Perceptions of Race, Ethnicity, and Language Data Collection in Electronic Health Records,” Medical Care 59(5): 379-85.
Taylor M. Cruz. 2020. “Perils of Data-Driven Equity: Safety-Net Care and Big Data’s Elusive Grasp on Health Inequality,” Big Data & Society January-June: 1-14. [Open access]
Taylor M. Cruz. 2017. “The Making of a Population: Challenges, Implications, and Consequences of the Quantification of Social Difference,” Social Science & Medicine 174: 79-85.