Personal Data and Power Asymmetries in U.S. Collegiate Sports Teams

Abstract

Collaborations increasingly draw on personal data. We examine personal-data-supported collaborations in a high stakes, high-performance environment: collegiate sports. We conducted 22 interviews with people from four common roles within collegiate sports teams: athletes, sport coaches, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches. Using boundary negotiating artifacts as a lens for analysis, we describe an ecology of personal data in collaborations among these four roles. We use this ecology to highlight tensions and foreground issues of power asymmetry in these collaborations. To characterize these power asymmetries in the collaborative use of personal data, we propose an extension of boundary negotiating artifacts: extraction artifacts.

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