Rethinking Family Informatics through a Data Feminist Lens: A Duoethnography of Shared Data, (In)visible Labor, and Everyday Tracking

We present a duoethnography of our data-tracking practices as first-time parents during the first two years of our child’s life, beginning during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on Data Feminism and our own three-dimension framework for family informatics, we examine how digital tracking technologies mediated our experiences of care, shaped relational dynamics, and surfaced tensions around visibility, accountability, and normative parenting expectations. Our reflections trace how data practices evolved over time, highlighting the emotional, ethical, and material implications of co-tracking in early parenthood. We show how digital tools variously supported, constrained, and reconfigured our caregiving labor, often embedding value-laden assumptions about “good” parenting. Through our analysis, we offer methodological insights into the use of duoethnography in HCI as a means to surface plural perspectives and entangled subjectivities. We contribute a feminist discourse to family informatics and personal data studies by proposing design considerations for more reflexive, relational, and contextually aware tracking systems.