'Big Data'

And the final speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Felicia Loecherbach, whose interest is in video-based data donation, in the specific context of TikTok. Data donation is now a growing trend in digital media studies, of course, and many workable approaches to this have been developed, but to work with this approach remains difficult in practice.

TikTok is a key target for this – both because of its current importance with certain user demographics, the limitations of its API, and the fact that API-based observations do not accurately represent the experience …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Jiyoun Suk. Her interest is in whether engagement metrics on social media actually measure attention: the average engagement rate across the major platforms is below 2%; in the US, for instance, some 70% never post or comment about political or social issues. So do attention and engagement actually align, and under what conditions – and what does this mean for what we can draw from the data we have?

We can expect a gap between attention and engagement because engagement requires crossing an …

The next speaker in this panel at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Kilian Bühling, whose focus is on reconstructing deleted Telegram messages to prevent potential biases in data analysis. Message deletion and data loss is a common issue in working with digital trace data; the volume of deleted messages in a data sample increases over time, so data collected a substantial time after an even will miss quite a lot of messages.

This challenges the validity of analyses of such data, as well as the reproducibility of data analyses by other researchers; indeed, it is …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Ernesto de León, whose interest is in who donates digital trace data. Data donation studies have become increasingly popular in recent times, of course, but continue to be plagued by sample bias: some users are simply much more likely to be willing to donate data to researchers.

The focus of criticism has been on the willingness to debate, the lack of data on non-participants, and the limited efforts to scope the downstream effects from biased data donation samples. The present project addressed these …

The third day at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town starts for me with a session on digital trace data, and a paper by Kyle van Gaeveren, whose interest is in digital trace data. He notes that digital log data have always been very smartphone-dependent, and comparisons of this with laptop-derived trace data are important.

His project provided laptops to some 100 knowledge workers, and used a tool called ActivityWatch to trace which laptop and smartphone apps people were using; this tracked duration, frequency, and fragmentation, but also switching between devices and user mood. Part of the …

And the lucky last speaker in the final session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library in Frankfurt is the excellent Giada Marino, whose interest is the operation of data access provisions under DSA Article 40.12. The focus here is on very large online marketplace platforms and the systemic risks they pose to minors.

Article 40.12 addresses access to publicly available data from Very Large Online Platforms and Search Engines; this is coordinated across EU jurisdictions by the Expert Group on Access to Publicly Available Data (ECAT). The present project focusses on marketplace platforms such as …

The final speaker in this session at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Susmita Gangopadhyay, presenting a project that has engaged in a continuous crawl of Telegram’s public channels. Telegram is a platform that has grown substantially in recent years, with some 950 million users.

The platform has an API which can be used to gather data from the platform, and this tends to focus on groups (which are many-to-many, may be public or private, and have distinct administrators) and channels (which are one-to-many only, with named administrators). Otherwise there are some functional similarities between …

Up next at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library is Ramin Soleymani, whose focus is on the analysis of social media content from a social ecological perspective. The use of social media has enabled digital nature experiences, somewhat making up for an overall decline in the direct nature experiences of an increasingly urban population; this might lead to the emergence of digital relational values including seeding, spreading, and grounding.

Relational values are a relatively new concept in the science policy arena; they complement nature’s instrumental (extractive) and intrinsic (inherent) values. Relational values refer to the relationships …