Research

Research Interests

• Critical Data Studies - Data Practices - Digital and Sensory Data
• Software and Platform Studies
• Apps and Sensory Media
• Digital Research Methodologies
• Inventive and Interdisciplinary Methodologies
• Quantification, Metrification and Valuation
• Media of Calculation
• Algorithmic Accountability
• Issue Mapping
• Infrastructures

Current Research Projects

Research Statement

My work explores the various intersections between new media, methods and economic sociology, with a specific interest in web economies, platform and software studies, digital methods, brands, value, topology, measurement, numeracy, social media, digital sociology, inventive methodologies and issue mapping online. I am interested in advancing new methodologies to study digital and platform cultures drawing on digital research methods and its intersection to other methodological approaches. Among my key questions is how value is generated from digital data and how quantification and numbers participate in life in digital media.

In 2019, I founded the Center for Digital Methodologies in Media, Language and Technology Research with other colleagues in order to bring together method development at the University of Siegen. Further I am deputy speaker of the DFG CRC Media of Cooperation which explores media as cooperatively accomplished means of cooperation.

From April 2017 I am co-speaker (together with Tristan Thielmann) of the DFG funded Graduate School 'Locating Media' which explores media research in motion and in situ. The graduate school seeks to explore inventive methods for interdisciplinary media research, bringing together mobile, ethnographic and digital methodologies.

I hold a 4 year NWO Veni grant for the project ‘Numbering Life. Measures and Metrics in Digital Media’ (2015-2019). The project investigates the socio-technical conditions and implications of quantification in social media platforms. It asks how phenomena such as Like or friend counts, popularity rankings or algorithmic metrics participate in what they attempt to measure and allow third-parties to make social media activities economically valuable.

Together with colleague Tristan Thielmann, I am principal investigator of the project ‘Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces’ which is part of the Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen (2016-2019). The sub-project investigates social forms of navigation in the field of US routemaps, drones and social navigation apps to explore their media practices and technicity and the specific forms of navigations they enable. Together with Fernando van der Vlist, I focus on advancing new digital methods for analysing apps which can study the operation of software in mobile and situative ways. Furthermore, the project seeks to advance the field of platform studies, by exploring how drones and apps engage in and expand current understandings of platforms. I am part of the international App Studies Initiative.

In addition, I am member of the interdisciplinary research initiative Popular Cultures at the University of Siegen which explores the nexus of pop and popularity. In this context I have been exploring interdisciplinary perspectives on lists, asking how lists create order, relations and values together with my colleagues Markus Helmerich, Johannes Paßmann and Matthias Schaffrick.

Since 2009, I have been a member of the Digital Methods Initiative Amsterdam and have been involved in a multiplicity of projects, many of them still ongoing. Among these projects is the exploration of third party tracking ecologies, leading to a new tool to identify trackers and the Tracker Guide to the Cloud which was exhibited at MOTI, but also experimental projects on studying app ecologies as well as Twitter data. Furthermore, I am part of the Public Data Lab, an international consortium for inventive data-intensive research.

Together with Bernhard Rieder, I founded the Media of Calculation research group which investigates the role calculation, understood widely as mechanical reasoning, plays in contemporary societies. Although practices like statistics, cost-benefit analysis, or accounting have been important practices for centuries, the invention of the computer and its more recent infiltration into the pores of contemporary societies have put the spotlight on calculation as a means to represent and intervene. The research project contributes to an understanding of the calculative agencies of media and their social, cultural and economic effects by organizing reading groups and events.

Awards and Grants