The final speaker in this last paper session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Theo Araujo, presenting the Macroscope project for investigating complex societal issues at scale. This brings together various key Dutch organisations in the humanities and social sciences, and seeks to develop a substantial number of methodological solutions and data observatories.
One aspect of this is to develop a Netherlands Media Corpus, bringing together conventional and emerging media sources (news, podcasts, television, social media) in a single corpus; building on this, it will then develop a Web & Media Diets Observatory that examines what media content actual users engage with and links this with individual survey data and broader public debate patterns.
The workflow here is to connect the LISS survey data with Web and media exposure history data donations and with cultural heritage collections of the content of such media sources, and with broader social, cultural, and political patterns. This also enables an analysis of the gaps: what content is not consumed by users, for instance? This then also enables the better targeting of collection activities by cultural heritage institutions.
Such work can also help to address the challenges of measurement and representation: what are we measuring when we identify news exposure, for instance; how do we represent those users who are not exposed to the news. Other challenges relate to privacy and copyright, and working with data here might require the use of secure research environments. The sheer size of datasets also complicates working with such data resources. And once again, FAIR principles should also be respected here.
