Weizenbaum Library (Weizenbaum Institute)
Not a member yet
864 research outputs found
Sort by
Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice. The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo
Get PDFThe article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system
Pushing the Scalability of RDF Engines on IoT Edge Devices
Get PDFSemantic interoperability for the Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by standards and technologies from the Semantic Web. As recent research suggests a move towards decentralised IoT architectures, we have investigated the scalability and robustness of RDF (Resource Description Framework)engines that can be embedded throughout the architecture, in particular at edge nodes. RDF processing at the edge facilitates the deployment of semantic integration gateways closer to low-level devices. Our focus is on how to enable scalable and robust RDF engines that can operate on lightweight devices. In this paper, we have first carried out an empirical study of the scalability and behaviour of solutions for RDF data management on standard computing hardware that have been ported to run on lightweight devices at the network edge. The findings of our study shows that these RDF store solutions have several shortcomings on commodity ARM (Advanced RISC Machine) boards that are representative of IoT edge node hardware. Consequently, this has inspired us to introduce a lightweight RDF engine, which comprises an RDF storage and a SPARQL processor for lightweight edge devices, called RDF4Led. RDF4Led follows the RISC-style (Reduce Instruction Set Computer) design philosophy. The design constitutes a flash-aware storage structure, an indexing scheme, an alternative buffer management technique and a low-memory-footprint join algorithm that demonstrates improved scalability and robustness over competing solutions. With a significantly smaller memory footprint, we show that RDF4Led can handle 2 to 5 times more data than popular RDF engines such as Jena TDB (Tuple Database) and RDF4J, while consuming the same amount of memory. In particular, RDF4Led requires 10%–30% memory of its competitors to operate on datasets of up to 50 million triples. On memory-constrained ARM boards, it can perform faster updates and can scale better than Jena TDB and Virtuoso. Furthermore, we demonstrate considerably faster query operations than Jena TDB and RDF4J
Herausforderungen und Handlungsempfehlungen betrieblicher Weiterbildungspraxis in Zeiten der Digitalisierung
Get PDFThe digital transformation of production processes is constantly progressing. The human workforce is a central success factor, but employees must be prepared for the requirements induced by change, using inter alia competence development. In reality, however, the content-related and pedagogical freedom to design vocational training is often inadequately addressed. Based on the changes trough digitization in production processes, the challenges of current continuing vocational training in enterprises are discussed. Recommendations for action are then derived and illustrated by examples. The recommendations for action can serve as a basis for the design and implementation of their further vocational training practice
Das Verfahren geht weit über „die App“ hinaus – Datenschutzfragen von Corona-Tracing-Apps. Einführung in Datenschutz-Folgenabschätzungen als Mittel, gesellschaftliche Implikationen zu diskutieren
Get PDFSeit der Ausbreitung des SARS-CoV-2-Virus in Europa Anfang 2020 wir dan technischen Lösungen zur Eindämmung der Pandemie gearbeitet. Unter den verschiedenen Systementwürfen stechen jene hervor, die damit werben, datenschutzfreundlich und DSGVO-konform zu sein. Die DSGVO selbst verpflichtet die Betreiberïnnen umfangreicher Datenverarbeitungssysteme wie etwa Tracing-Apps zur Anfertigung einer Datenschutz-Folgenabschätzung (DSFA) aufgrund des hohen Risikos für die Rechte- und Freiheiten (Art. 35 DSGVO). Hierbei handelt es sich um eine strukturierte Risikoanalyse, die mögliche grundrechtsrelevante Folgen einer Datenverarbeitung im Vorfeld identifiziert und bewertet. Wir zeigen in unserer DSFA, dass auch die aktuelle, dezentrale Implementierung der Corona-Warn-App zahlreiche gravierende Schwachstellen und Risiken birgt. Auf der rechtlichen Seite haben wir die Legitimationsgrundlage einer freiwilligen Einwilligung untersucht und formulieren die begründete Forderung, dass der Einsatz einer Tracing-App gesetzlich geregelt werden muss. Weiterhin wurden Maßnahmen zur Verwirklichung von Betroffenenrechten nicht ausreichend betrachtet. Nicht zuletzt ist die Behauptung, ein Datum sei anonym, hoch voraussetzungsreich. Anonymisierung muss als ein kontinuierlicher Vorgang begriffen werden, der eine Abtrennung des Personenbezugs zum Ziel hat und auf dem Zusammenspiel von rechtlichen, organisatorischen und technischen Maßnahmen beruht. Der derzeit vorliegenden Corona-Warn-App fehlt es an einem solchen expliziten Trennungsvorgang. Unsere DSFA zeigt dabei auch die wesentlichen Defizite der offiziellen DSFA der Corona-Warn-App auf
Who Are They and Where? Insights Into the Social and Spatial Dimensions of Imagined Audiences From a Mobile Diary Study of Twitter Users
Get PDFSocial media users hardly know who is reading their posts, but they form ideas about their readership. Researchers have coined the term imagined audience for the social groups that actors imagine seeing their public communication. However, social groups are not the only aspect that requires imagination: In the potentially borderless online environment, the geographical scope and locations of one’s audience are also unknown. Furthermore, research has demonstrated that imagined audiences vary between people and situations, but what explains these variations is unclear. In this article, we address these two gaps—the geographical scope and predictors of imagined audiences—using data from a mobile experience sampling method study of 105 active Twitter users from Berlin, Germany. Our results show that respondents mostly think of a geographically broad audience, which is spread out across the country or even globally. The imagined geographical scope and social groups depend on both the communicator and the usage situation. While the audience’s social composition especially depends on tweet content and respondents’ sociodemographic characteristics, the geographical scope is best explained by respondents’ biography and personal mobility, including their experience of living in other countries and local residential duration
How Right-Wing Alternative News Sites in the U.S. Depict Antifa
Get PDFThis work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“
Weizenbaum Report 2019: Politische Partizipation in Deutschland
No full text**Deutsch**
Der Weizenbaum Report ist eine jährlich erscheinende Publikation zur politischen Partizipation in Deutschland. Er stellt Befunde der bevölkerungsrepräsentativen Befragung der Forschungseinheit Weizenbaum Panel vor, die seit 2019 durchgeführt wird. Im Zentrum steht die Untersuchung verschiedener Formen politischer Partizipation im Zeitverlauf und ihre Entwicklung unter Digitalisierungsbedingungen. Die erste Welle aus dem Jahr 2019 untersuchte digitale Partizipationsformen, Bürgernormen und den Umgang mit Hass im Netz. Die Ergebnisse geben Einblick in Verhalten und Meinungen der deutschen Gesellschaft mit besonderem Fokus auf traditionelle vs. „vernetzte“ Bürgernormen.**English**
The Weizenbaum Report is an annual publication on political participation in Germany. It presents findings from a survey representative of the population conducted by the Weizenbaum Panel research unit since 2019. The focus is on investigating various forms of political participation over time and their development against the backdrop of digitalization. The first wave from 2019 examined digital forms of participation, civic norms, and common responses to online hate. The results provide insight into the behavior and opinions of German society with a particular focus on traditional vs. "networked" civic norms.This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“
(De)constructing ethics for autonomous cars: A case study of Ethics Pen-Testing towards “AI for the Common Good”
Get PDFRecently, many AI researchers and practitioners have embarked on research visions that involve doing AI for “Good”. This is part of a general drive towards infusing AI research and practice with ethical thinking. One frequent theme in current ethical guidelines is the requirement that AI be good for all, or: contribute to the Common Good. But what is the Common Good, and is it enough to want to be good? Via four lead questions, the concept of Ethics Pen-Testing (EPT) identifies challenges and pitfalls when determining, from an AI point of view, what the Common Good is and how it can be enhanced by AI. The current paper reports on a first evaluation of EPT. EPT is applicable to various artefacts that have ethical impact, including designs for or implementations of specific AI technology, and requirements engineering methods for eliciting which ethical settings to build into AI. The current study focused on the latter type of artefact. In four independent sessions, participants with close but varying involvements in “AI and ethics” were asked to deconstruct a method that has been proposed for eliciting ethical values and choices in autonomous car technology, an online experiment modelled on the Trolley Problem. The results suggest that EPT is well-suited to this task: the remarks made by participants lent themselves well to being structured by the four lead questions of EPT, in particular, regarding the question what the problem is and about which stakeholders define it. As part of the problem definition, the need became apparent for thorough technical domain knowledge in discussions of AI and ethics. Thus, participants questioned the framing and the presuppositions inherent in the experiment and the discourse on autonomous cars that underlies the experiment. They transitioned from discussing a specific AI artefact to discussing its role in wider socio-technical systems. Results also illustrate to what extent and how the requirements engineering method forces us to not only have a discussion about which values to “build into” AI systems, the substantive building blocks of the Common Good, but also about how we want to have this discussion at all. Thus, it forces us to become explicit about how we conceive of democracy and the constitutional state and the procedural building blocks of the Common Good
Die digitale Konstellation. Eine Positionsbestimmung
Get PDFThe emergence of the digital society has become one of the most pressing research topics in social science. So far political science has been at the margins of the debate being restricted by a rather narrow focus on networked communications. The paper attempts to change this by presenting a more encompassing way to thematize digitalization from within political science. After briefly having criticized the research development in political science the paper reconstructs at length some of the most popular conceptualizations in neighboring disciplines. While we highlight the commonalities and strengths of those approaches in theorizing digitalization, we criticize their rather derivative understanding of democratic practices and the political as such. We go on to propose a modified understanding—labeled the “digital constellation”—that looks at the changing shape of democracy by developing a much more nuanced understanding of the interplay of societies and technology. Finally, the argument is illustrated by a short exemplary analysis of the changes occurring in political representation in the context of digitalization
Varieties of platform work. Platforms and social inequality in Germany and the United States
Get PDFThe platform economy has been criticized for exacerbating social inequalities in various ways. This study draws on these discussions and examines the extent to which social inequalities are being reproduced, reduced, or even increased within platform work. The first central question is that of the precariousness of this form of work and the vulnerability of the platform workers as a group. This is followed by a second question about the role of classical dimensions of inequality of education and gender within the group of platform workers. The study focuses on inequalities related to income, workload, and the subjective perception of platform work. It follows a comparative approach, building on institutionalist analyses developed in labor market and inequality research. The empirical analysis is based on case studies of 15 crowdwork platforms in the United States and Germany and on an online survey of crowdworkers in both countries. While platforms represent a global organizational model, they are embedded in different models of capitalism. The study shows that existing labor market segmentation and social welfare systems determine who works on platforms and to what extent. The weaker the social safety net, the more likely platform work is to be both a curse and a blessing: It offers a much needed and flexible source of income, albeit under extremely precarious conditions. The stronger the social safety net, on the other hand, the greater the market power of workers vis-à-vis the platforms.This work has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany (BMBF) (grant no.: 16DII111, 16DII112, 16DII113, 16DII114, 16DII115, 16DII116, 16DII117 – „Deutsches Internet-Institut“