1,720,994 research outputs found
The platform as ecosystem: Configurations and dynamics of governance and power
Get PDFDigital ‘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
Counter-Mapping Surveillance: A Critical Cartography of Mass Surveillance Technology After Snowden
No full textThis article critically examines mass surveillance technology revealed by Snowden’s disclosures. It addresses that we do not only live in a society where surveillance is deeply inscribed but more urgently, that it is increasingly difficult to study surveillance when its technologies and practices are difficult to distinguish from everyday routines. Considerably, many of the technologies and systems utilised for surveillance purposes were not originally designed as proper surveillance technologies. Instead, they have effectively become surveillance technologies by being enrolled into a particular surveillant assemblage. Three contributions are made towards critical scholarship on surveillance, intelligence, and security. First, a novel empirical cartographic methodology is developed that employs the vocabularies of assemblages and actor–networks. Second, this methodology is applied to critically examine global mass surveillance according to Snowden. Multiple leaked data sources have been utilised to trace actors, their associations amongst each other, and to create several graphical maps and diagrams. These maps provide insights into actor types and dependence relations described in the original disclosed documents. Third, the analytical value of three ordering concepts as well as the logistics of surveillance are explored via notable actors and actor groups. In short, this contribution provides empirical cartographic methods, concepts, and analytical targets for critically examining surveillance technology and its particular compositions. It addresses challenges of resisting mass surveillance and some forms of data activism, and calls for the continuing proliferation of counter-maps to facilitate grounded critique, to raise awareness, and to gain a foothold for meaningful resistance against mass surveillance
Governing the Global Proliferation of Digital Surveillance Technologies: Lessons from the EU
No full textThe chapter engages with the EU’s legal discourse surroundingthe regulation of digital surveillance technologies or so-called spyware.It does so by focusing on the EU’s attempt to regulate the internationalsale of digital surveillance technologies. The urgent need for rule-basedcontrol of the global surveillance technologies market has been on theagenda of the UN, EU, governments, NGOs, and research institutions.Within the EU, a particular legal instrument, known as dual-use exportcontrol, has come under the spotlight as a tool to mitigate human rightsrisks associated with the sale and transfer of spyware. While the fieldof law has developed to mitigate military risks within the EU’s securityand defense policies, it has not yet sufficiently evolved to address themultifaceted human rights risks that the sale of surveillance technologiesmay pose to the destination countrie
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Governing the Digital Society
Get PDFDigital technologies have rapidly become integral to communities and societies, bringing both significant benefits and serious concerns. Issues such as misinformation, disinformation, online polarization, discrimination, and widening inequalities have prompted a critical and urgent debate: Can digital societies still be effectively governed? This book brings together insights from various disciplines to address the pressing question: “How can we develop and apply principles of (good) governance in digital societies that are organized democracies?”
Governing the Digital Societypresents a range of governance approaches, focusing on online platforms, artificial intelligence, and the public values that underpin these technologies. The authors position themselves at the forefront of their disciplines, offering perspectives from law, critical data studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, computational linguistics, and the political economy of media. Expert interviews provide additional insights into ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of governing digital societies. The book demonstrates that governance is not just a technical or legal process but a complex societal one, embedding norms, values, and morality into our institutions and daily lives
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Situating the Marketization of Data
Get PDFData are neither inherently valuable, nor do all data have the same value. This contribution argues how data are made useful and valuable to specific actors and for specific purposes. It draws attention to the material politics of data flows and valuation, and to the many different actors and stakeholders who build the technological conduits and pipelines that facilitate the circulation and use of data. Therefore, it highlights the need to study the infrastructural layer of the global data market, as well as the central role of intermediaries who build and uphold these infrastructures for the exchange and use of data for different purposes. Both are important to situate the processes of datafication and data marketization in specific empirical settings
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
