Understanding data studies - a methodological and conceptual inquiry into research on datafication

Abstract

Data are increasingly interwoven in various aspects of our social lives. In our everyday and professional lives many kinds of data are produced, as we make online searches via search engines, chat with loved ones and friends via social media, or use a maps app on our smartphone to find our way in an unfamiliar place. To use these digital data for decision-making, and literally anything else, people rely on computational technologies. With these, digital data can be processed, recombined, operated with, used, and sold. Going hand in hand with the pervasiveness of data in our society is the process of datafication.

Researchers across manifold academic disciplines and fields from computer science to sociology, media studies, communication research, humanities, and education research are working on topics concerning this datafied society. In the recent years, this body of academic work has been consolidating under the terms ‘critical data studies’ or just ‘data studies’, drawing on various ontological, epistemological, theoretical, and methodological approaches to studying datafication processes. How, then, in this manifold of perspectives, academic knowledge about datafication processes and our datafied societies is produced? What is ‘critical’ in data studies? How do scholars conducting research on datafication reflect about “what matters we use to think other matters with;” (Haraway, 2016, p. 12) in their studies? With my thesis, I advance our understanding of how what is known about datafication and datafied societies is produced.

With the literature analysis of current empirical studies on datafication and expert interviews with datafication scholars, my thesis makes methodological and conceptual contributions to the data studies and adjacent fields concerned with the datafied society. Methodologically, I map out methods assemblages of empirical datafication research and develop a heuristic for their analysis. Taken together, they can be used as a reflection tool for advancing sensitivities to the manifold of empirical phenomena addressed in research as ‘datafication’. Conceptually, I show how empirical datafication research produces re-situated conceptualisations of datafication. I discuss the role of critique in data studies and propose pathways for further, generative, care-ful critique, contributing to the literature bridging data studies with feminist traditions of thought.