Digital Culture

The Digital Culture group studies people and society in the digital age, with a focus on datafication, Big Data, data ethics, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Our research is centered on the observation of everyday, socio-material practices in increasingly networked systems that provide algorithmic analyses and access new data sources. We see individual, everyday experiences of digital realities as dependent on unequal opportunities to participate in and to influence – or avoid – data analytics, platforms, and algorithms. For example, our research shows how the everyday data practices of researchers working with social media data unfold in the context of an increasingly important role of commercial internet platforms and new data economies.

We critically engage with the epistemological, methodological and research ethics challenges of datafication in research, particularly in relation to Big Data as a source.

In further research, we address issues such as bias in artificial intelligence decision systems, explore social casual games, and aim to foster and study open science for digitization research.

Teaching focuses on the theory and practice of researching the digital, data ethics, digital data management and various topics of (qualitative) internet research. We offer interdisciplinary teaching formats.