82 research outputs found
TECHNIQUES OF INTERSECTION – METRICS AS CONNECTORS AND SEPARATORS IN TWITTER RESEARCH
No full textSocial media platforms are characterized by the sheer volume of activity and thus data, whilst at the same time only offering very specific and often limited access possibilities. When studying Facebook or Twitter, questions and techniques of delimitation, i.e. the selection of subsets and the use of specific metrics, are particularly relevant. This paper sets out to reflect on metrics in Twitter research as specific techniques that allow to investigate the making of boundaries and connections, while at the same time functioning both as connectors and separators. The question of cutting and slicing has been discussed in relation to sampling techniques in the context of social science research (Uprichard; Bryman; Gilbert) and increasingly in relation to social media research (Rieder; Gerlitz and Rieder), but the kind of analytical “dissections” we perform by selecting and designing metrics are less well understood. Metrics, however, equally need to be seen as epistemic devices that engage in breaking the practices sprawling on social media platforms apart and put them together again in various ways. The objective of the paper is to reflect on the affordances of different metrics in social media research and in particular in Twitter research. We draw on a previous experimental study on ‘mining one percent of Twitter’ (Gerlitz and Rieder) by expanding our initial reflections on the epistemic work and boundary making capacities of sampling to include the more subtle forms of carving implied by metrics
Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods
No full textHow was testing—and not testing—for coronavirus articulated as a testing situation on social media in the Spring of 2020? Our study examines everyday situations of Covid-19 testing by analyzing a large corpus of Twitter data collected during the first 2 months of the pandemic. Adopting a sociological definition of testing situations, as moments in which it is no longer possible to go on in the usual way, we show how social media analysis can be used to surface a range of such situations across scales, from the individual to the societal. Practicing a form of large-scale data exploration we call “interpretative querying” within the framework of situational analysis, we delineated two types of coronavirus testing situations: those involving locations of testing and those involving relations. Using lexicon analysis and composite image analysis, we then determined what composes the two types of testing situations on Twitter during the relevant period. Our analysis shows that contrary to the focus on individual responsibility in UK government discourse on Covid-19 testing, English-language Twitter reporting on coronavirus testing at the time thematized collective relations. By a variety of means, including in-memoriam portraits and infographics, this discourse rendered explicit challenges to societal relations and arrangements arising from situations of testing and not testing for Covid-19 and highlighted the multifaceted ways in which situations of corona testing amplified asymmetrical distributions of harms and benefits between different social groupings, and between citizens and state, during the first months of the pandemic
The Tracker Guide to the Cloud
No full textThe Tracker Guide to the Cloud will help you to better understand what happens when you open a website in your browser. Which content is being “pulled in” from the cloud, and which user data is being collected by the present trackers. It will also help you relate to cloud critique, and formulate your own viewpoints and research projects. The publication was developed by researchers at the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam and information designers at DensityDesign, Politecnico di Milano.
This field guide offers an introduction to recognizing the traces and fingerprints of online trackers, and content served through the Content Delivery Networks of the cloud.
Research by: Diego Dacal, Kalina Dancheva, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Sara Minucci, Sabine Niederer, Lonneke van der Velden, and Esther Weltevrede.
Design by: Alessandro Brunetti and Gabriele Colombo
First edition: July 2012
Second edition: September 201
The Tracker Guide to the Cloud
No full textThe Tracker Guide to the Cloud will help you to better understand what happens when you open a website in your browser. Which content is being “pulled in” from the cloud, and which user data is being collected by the present trackers. It will also help you relate to cloud critique, and formulate your own viewpoints and research projects. The publication was developed by researchers at the Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam and information designers at DensityDesign, Politecnico di Milano.
This field guide offers an introduction to recognizing the traces and fingerprints of online trackers, and content served through the Content Delivery Networks of the cloud.
Research by: Diego Dacal, Kalina Dancheva, Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Sara Minucci, Sabine Niederer, Lonneke van der Velden, and Esther Weltevrede.
Design by: Alessandro Brunetti and Gabriele Colombo
First edition: July 2012
Second edition: September 201
Social media-related Android (Google Play) and iOS (iTunes Store) app ecosystems
No full textThis dataset provides information about all the apps that are part of the [Facebook], [Instagram], [Snapchat], and [Twitter]-related Android (Google Play) and iOS (iTunes (App) Store) app ecosystems, derived from Google Play (play.google.com) and Apple's App Store (apps.apple.com) on July 14 and 19, 2018 (N = 19,481). They include all app results for the input search queries, as well as all apps related to them, as specified on the app details pages (i.e. ‘Similar’ Android apps or iOS apps ‘You May Also Like’). This information includes: (a) details about each Android or iOS app (N = 998 and 531, respectively); (b) relations of each Android or iOS app, and details about each of the related apps (N = 12,772 and 5,180); and (c) (high-resolution) information graphics created from these sources. Data were collected with the ‘Google Play “Similar” Apps’ and ‘iTunes Store’ tools (Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam). The dataset is deposited for the (open access) journal article: Gerlitz, C., Helmond, A., van der Vlist, F. N., & Weltevrede, E. J. T. (2019). Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations Between Apps and Social Media. In C. Gerlitz, A. Helmond, D. B. Nieborg, & F. N. van der Vlist. (Eds), Apps and Infrastructures (Special Issue), Computational Culture – A Journal of Software Studies, 7. Computational Culture. http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform/
The platform as ecosystem: Configurations and dynamics of governance and power
No full textDigital ‘platforms’ owned and operated by powerful Big Tech companies have shaped and impacted social, economic, and political life in significant ways. Yet, platforms remain an ambiguous phenomenon. What exactly are these platforms? How can we identify and understand the features of their power? The platform as ecosystem explains how not merely the platforms themselves but especially their larger ‘ecosystems’ are important for understanding the unique features of platform governance and power. Platform ecosystems have become the dominant technological, organisational, and governance model for digital platforms over the past fifteen years. These ecosystems comprise many different types of users including end-consumers, software developers, marketers and advertisers, and business partners who build software tools, products, and services of their own ‘on top’ of the interfaces provided and controlled by leading platforms. These users each help build and expand platform ecosystems while negotiating governance and control by central platforms. This dissertation examines different aspects of platform ecosystems to determine how platforms’ material foundations or infrastructures relate to governance and power. It develops several novel empirical and historical approaches for studying the distinct material and relational features of digital platform ecosystems. This reveals how platforms derive considerable power from their ecosystems and provides unique empirical and historical insights into the technological, organisational, and evolutionary features of platform (and mobile app) ecosystems. These approaches and insights are relevant to digital media and platform researchers and help policymakers, regulators, and authorities worldwide dealing with the challenges of governing digital economies and societies
- …
