Blog

The next session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is on the role of chatbots in data donation studies, and begins with Daniël Jurg, whose focus is on news engagement via chat systems; this involves chatbot audits as well as as chatbot data donations.

The news environment is cacophonic today, and this has led users to employ various curation tactics that are also informed by algorithmic imaginaries; in chatbot environments, though, there is also automatic curation by the chatbot itself. Chatbot systems engage in conversational steering, and this is also a strategy available to users …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Zoltán Kmetty, whose focus is on difference between participant intentions and actual donations to data donation projects. There is a considerable willingness-to-donation gap, and methodological interventions are required to address this; the present project tested this during the 2026 Hungarian parliamentary election by using AI chatbots as data donation assistants.

The study employed a standard data donation approach, but in the data donation module briefing split the participant base into two groups: one received a static data export guide, and the other …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Sophia Graf, whose focus is on the Dein Feed, Deine Wahl project conducted during several 2026 state elections in Germany. This uses data donations to study how TikTok distributes political content during these elections; it recruiters participants during public events and also reflects back to donors how their own content and engagement patterns compare to other TikTok users.

This is a form of citizen science, involving ordinary citizens in political communication research. Such approaches can increase the diversity of perspectives in the …

The next speaker in this session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Elisabeth Schmidbauer, whose interest is especially in the role of visual communication in recruiting data donations. This was tested by using eye tracking and a post-exposure walkthrough of the eye-tracking data, in an experimental setting.

Key theoretical backgrounds here include social presence, tested by including a picture of the researcher in recruitment materials; the impact of AI-generated images in the communication of studies, where (poorly designed) AI content might put off potential participants; and the question of how much potential participants engage …

The next session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin starts with Olya Hakobyan, whose focus is on the question of how to scale up data donation studies. The first challenge is how to motivate and recruit participants, which is centrally a question of trust in the researchers; the second is dropouts of participants due to technical difficulties; the next is managing the influx of data donations, especially if studies have been able to recruit a substantial number of participants; and finally studies also need to confront the challenge of varying data quality in donations.

Olya’s …

It’s the first day in October, and I’ve made my way to the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, and we start today with a keynote by Jasper Tjaden from the University of Potsdam, whose topic is social media data acquisition through social research bots. This is especially valuable for social media audit studies; it moves beyond the understanding of bots as problematic actors that meddle in information and communication flows, and instead uses bots for good.

Such bots then become a vehicle for data collection, and fight for transparency in data science. One way of doing …

The final speaker in this final paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Tereza Schambergerová. Her focus is on the impact of search engine optimisation (SEO) on AI overviews, but she begins by introducing the three key theories of political economy in the attention economy, gatekeeping as it applies to search engines, and the agenda-setting function of search engines like Google.

Her work draws on three datasets, with a focus on the Czech Republic: AI overview monitoring data from DataForSEO; search volume information from Ahrefs; and real click-through rate (CTR) data using the Google Search Console. In …

The next speaker at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Hadeer ElMalah, whose focus is on both search engine optimisation (SEO) and generative engine optimisation (GEO). The algorithms that manage SEO on the search engine side have evolved greatly over the years, but are now further disrupted by AI-enhanced search processes. For marketers, the big question is now how to get brands cited in AI responses.

This requires a more advanced understanding of how generative AI engines choose what to cite. Very basically, retrieval-augmented generation relies on indexing documents; retrieving potentially relevant materials in response to a query; and …

We’re already in the final aber session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg, which starts with Sebastian Schultheiß, whose interest is in the impacts of search engine optimisation. SEO includes all measures a Website can take to improve its ranking in the organic search results provided by a search engine, as opposed to any paid advertising.

SEO’ed content may not actually be of better quality than the content it displaces in search results, of course – but what do we mean by quality here? We might think about intrinsic quality, referring to the inherent attributes of a document and …

The next speaker in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Ann-Sofie Klareld, whose interest is in the Swedish initiative to invest in the development of a national archives search engine. Her Arkiv project is interested in technologies for accessing archives, and their intentions. Archives are often seen as lying dormant: they are available, but not necessarily very visible or widely used. Technology is being used to remedy this and make archives more accessible.

Search engines are one such technology: they can make archives considerably more accessible, but archival search also differs from Web search, as the …