2014 / 1: Datenkritik

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'Good' platform-political reasons for 'bad' platform data. Zur sozio-technischen Geschichte der Plattformaktivitäten 'Fav', 'Retweet' und 'Like'
Paßmann, Johannes; Gerlitz, Carolin (2014)
In this article, we explore the relation between platform activities and their usage practices. Taking departure from predefined activities offered by social media platforms, this paper inquires into what may happen if platform features cater to opposing user practices. The paper investigates whether the data they produce can be considered as ‘bad’ platform data, just as Harold Garfinkel conceptualized ‘bad’ clinical records, and does so by engaging with the socio-technical history of Facebook’s Like and Twitter’s retweet and favourite button and their associated cultures of usage. In a first step, we question popular bottom-up narratives that presenti platform features as appropriations of emergent user practices, such as in the case of the retweet button. In a second step, we draw on ethnographic research on the German Favstar sphere – a group of popular Twitter amateurs with specific cooperation practices – to trace the divergent and at points even contradictory user practices in the case of the favourite button. In both cases, the politics of data visibility are of central importance, and a third group of actors appears besides the platform and its users, which recombines existing platform data into new contexts according to specific practices of usage for features. Such ‘satellite platforms’, we argue, can provide ‘good’ platform-political reasons for platform activities to produce ‘bad’ data.
Big Data und die Rückkehr des Positivismus. Zum gesellschaftlichen Umgang mit Daten
Püschel, Florian (2014)
In order to develop some sort of provisional Data Critique, it seems necessary to identify the central concerns and issues that such an approach would have to cover. Looking at various stereotypes about „data“ in the public discourse, it becomes clear that a positivist tendency exists that obscures the real causes of the social problems associated with new data technologies. Given the increasing societal impact of Big Data applications, it is also necessary to develop a better vocabulary for describing the different ways in which data is handled. This article proposes that the vocabulary of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory provides a useful conceptual basis for differentiating between the various ways in which data is recontextualized.
Das Datenhandeln - Zur Wissensordnung und Praxeologie des Online-Handels
Kaldrack, Irina; Köhler, Christian (2014)
‘Classical’ media practices were difficult to observe, always requiring external tools and methods. Digital media fundamentally changed this situation. Media use and data production have converged, such that practices basically record themselves. Such practices have become what we call ‘data acting/trading‘. Using the example of online shopping, we discuss how software, interfaces and the media practices of users and providers interact. Thereby, we show the complex relations between the experiences of users as individuals, their role as prosumers, and their representation as data sets in a digital media environment.
Die Kontingenz des Gegebenen - Zur Zeit der Datenkritik
Sprenger, Florian (2014)
Critique becomes risky when it is implicit. In a historical perspective and following the etymological roots, the paper conceptualizes different modes of critique and makes their epistemological foundations explicit. The idea of a critique of data was for the first time presented by Agentur Bilwet and Frank Hartmann in the 1990s. Following these traces, the article explores how Michel Foucaults genealogical model of critique can be applied to the objects of data-critique. Consequently, it asks how critique itself can be accomplished by data, how we can judge on the given, and finally, what all this means for media studies.
Google Trends: Using and Promoting Search Volume Indicators for Research
Richterich, Annika (2014)
This paper discusses methodological research developments related to the web service Google Trends. It reflects on the implications of data evaluation based on search engine queries. Recent methodological developments in quantitative research design can be traced back to the establishment of search engines as main gateways to online content. While Google Inc. uses its own received web search queries in order to maintain more specific services, such as the epistemological surveillance platform Google Flu Trends, it also presents excerpts from its databases publicly in Google Trends. The service indicates, for example, how frequently a search-term has been entered in Google, and where this query can be geographically located. Information on actual search volumes is not provided, however. Recent studies have drawn on Google Trends in order to analyse relations between these search volume indications and developments such as stock market moves. What is presented to the public and used in most of these studies, however, are merely surrogates and indicators of the original web search logs and search engine queries, rather than the data itself. Such developments should be seen critically, since the original data are exclusively available to respective media companies and selected scientists. Google Trends is supposed to communicate transparency and openness. As a symbolic gesture, it implies that Google ‘hands back’ parts of the user-generated search engine data to the public. Applications such as Google (Flu) Trends are staged as philanthropic investment, but are only one out of the many data mining possibilities that are based on the users automatically paying their search engine queries with the data they leave behind.
Von der ‚Macht der Daten‘ zur ‚Gemachtheit von Daten‘. Praktische Datenkritik als Gegenstand der Medienpädagogik
Dander, Valentin (2014)
In contrast to the approaches used in media studies, data critique in media pedagogy is conceptualized in analogy to competence-based media critique and connected to individual and collective agency. This leads to productive aspects of data critique that emerge alongside its negative-critical orientation. Open Government Data thereby appear as an apt field for experimentation towards the competencies necessary for practical data critique.
Was ist Datenkritik? Zur Einführung
Gießmann, Sebastian; Burkhardt, Marcus (2014)

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