Description:
Datalab – Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University and research partner in EDMO EU organize a joint workshop with the Digital News Dynamics Research Group at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin on data donation at scale. Data donation has the potential to enable new means of analyses for social media data, however, it is rarely applied at scale.
In the workshop we present two approaches to data collection of social media data via data donation at scale implemented in Denmark, respectively Germany, and discuss associated challenges and potentials.
For a more comprehensive understanding of how influence unfolds on social media we need to consider how users’ data can be utilized to a larger extent. Can users autonomy over their data aid in overcoming the ‘APIcalypse’ (Bruns 2019) and supplement studies with API access to social media data? Current data availability is still insufficient for answering key questions such as: How is influence over attitudes, behavior or well-being of social media users distributed among the platform’s algorithms, content creators, and user choice and how does such influence manifest? Especially in times of progressing media fragmentation, and an increased turn to social media information in times of crises, researchers need to take advantage of the fact that citizens everyday life is increasingly recorded to study these questions at scale.
Organizers:
Jakob Ohme, Professor at Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin, Guest Professor for political communication at the University of Zürich, and Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum
Jessica Walter, Assistant Professor at the department of media and journalism studies and Co-Director of Datalab- Center for Digital Social Research at Aarhus University, Denmark