Towards Digital Space Analysis

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Casper Radil, whose interest is in the analytical construction of Web data. How might we talk about the relationship between server access data and the actual communication processes which take place as users engage with the Websites themselves? Casper's approach is digital space analysis, which is an approach to contextualising the different forms of metadata which are created as users access Web content.

This also marks a shift from Web analytics, as a specific form, to digital analytics more broadly, which recognises that data about online practices now stem from a variety of data sources (Web data, social media data, etc.) well beyond conventional server-based data sources. Digital space analytics, then, calls for the analysis of digital media as consisting of multiple overlapping spaces - material spaces (such as content infrastructures - Websites as defined by their HTML code, etc.), event spaces (tracking processes of actual user interaction with material spaces), and symbolic spaces (which define the particular forms of user action as symbolic interactions) - which interact in a variety of ways.

Google Analytics is a useful tool in such digital space analysis, for example - but the specific assumptions which Google makes in constructing and presenting Web access data and metadata must also be understood in using such data sources. To construct a digital space requires a systematics for the construction of digital metadata - and this constructs a semantics of digital materials, digital time, and digital space.

Done well, digital space analysis then offers a standardisation and systematics for constructing metadata from digital spaces, a methodology for understanding how digital elements create different cultural and communicative forms, and methods for understanding how communication is produced and maintained by digital elements across digital platforms.