The next speakers in this IAMCR 2019 session are Gerret von Nordheim and Florian Meissner, whose focus is on the media reporting of digital technology. Such reporting has largely remained dominated by corporate voices, and a previous study has examined how Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung has covered tech issues over time.

The newspaper’s coverage of the violation of privacy norms has gradually declined over the past ten years, while datafication has become a more important topic – why is this so? Some of this may be explained by an elite focus, homophilous networks amongst journalists and tech leaders, and intermedia agenda-setting …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Andrew Iliadis, whose focus is on the role of metadata. Metadata and related terms such as ontology have rocketed to broader attention in recent years; here, philosophical concepts related to ontology have come to be translated to computationally accessible relationship constructs between data entities.

This renewed interest in ontologies is related to the growth in available data from a wide variety of sources; we are now at an advanced point in the hype cycle for computational analysis for such data, and further advances require better tools for connecting these disparate and …

The post-lunch session at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, who are interested in invisibilities in social media data. For instance, studying protest movements through social media means studying only what is visible about these movements in specific social media platforms – the data must exist in the various technological layers of these platforms in the first place, and those layers significantly constrict what data are available to the researcher. Additionally, such data must also be perceived as meaningful; this requires a shared understanding in the scholarly community that such data can be used …

The second keynote speaker in this opening evening at ECREA 2018 is Lina Dencik, whose keynote at last weekend’s iCS Symposium I covered a few days ago; here, her focus is on resistance in the datafied society. Such resistance is important in the present moment, and scholars have an increasingly important and more and more politicised role in this context.

There has been an overall, ongoing shift towards data-driven governance in recent years, leading to the emergence of a genuinely – but far from universally beneficially – datafied society. We have already seen a long history of digital surveillance, exemplified …

The final keynote speaker at this iCS Symposium today is the wonderful Katrin Weller, whose focus is on what we do with social media research data: datasets that have been collected by researchers and have already been utilised in scholarly analysis. How are such datasets shared on and archived by these researchers? Sharing here means directly passing these datasets on for use by others, while archiving preserves them for potential future uses. Both practices potentially advance reproducibility and comparability, reduce digital divides in data accessibility between researchers and research groups, and save time and money in data collection; they are …

The next speakers in this iCS Symposium are Anamaria Dutceac Segesten and Michael Bossetta, who describes the decline of API access as a possible blessing in disguise, as it forces us to explore new and additional sources of data on online communication. One approach to doing this is to pursue academic partnerships with commercial enterprises – for instance, with news publishers or civil society organisations.

This project worked in partnership with a political marketing company that provides data-driven political marketing strategies for actors in multiple countries around the world. The company develops its own tools and gathers its own data …