Reading the Same Data Differently: Interpretive Labor Across System Boundaries in Electronic Monitoring
For CSCW and HCI researchers, this work provides a qualitative account of how continuous sensing systems create asymmetric interpretive labor, highlighting design opportunities for more legible and accountable data-to-decision processes.
This study examines how electronic monitoring (EM) data are interpreted differently by supervised individuals and authorities in China's community corrections system, revealing 'interpretive misalignment' that shapes behaviors such as probing, strategic adaptation, and contestation.
Electronic monitoring (EM) systems are increasingly used in community corrections to enforce spatial, temporal, and behavioral rules through continuous sensing. While prior work has examined EM as a criminal justice tool or as a mechanism for compliance, less is known about how sensed data become meaningful in everyday practice. This poster examines EM as a dual-sided sensing system in which supervised individuals and authorities reason about the same data stream from different positions. Based on semi-structured interviews with 26 supervised individuals and 12 authorities in China's community corrections system, we show that supervised individuals infer system logic from outcomes with limited visibility into how data are interpreted, while authorities reconstruct behavior from ambiguous traces using contextual knowledge, professional experience, and institutional procedures. We call this structural divergence interpretive misalignment. It emerges from asymmetric access to data, context, and reasoning processes, and it shapes behavior through probing, strategic adaptation, over-compliance, disengagement, and contestation. We contribute a CSCW account of continuous sensing as distributed interpretive work and identify design opportunities for making data-to-decision processes more legible, contestable, and accountable across system sides.