Digital media are increasingly inseparable from practices of data generation, processing, interpretation, and use. Platforms track interactions, sensors translate environments and bodies into data, algorithms classify and predict, and AI systems depend upon extensive infrastructures of data production. Rather than treating data as neutral representations of an independently existing world, Critical Data Studies ask how data are produced, situated, operationalized, and contested – and what forms of knowledge, power, and agency emerge from these processes.
This research-oriented seminar approaches these questions from a media studies perspective. We will discuss key concepts and approaches from Critical Data Studies and related fields while examining concrete data practices and infrastructures in digital cultures. Topics include datafication, platforms, sensors and sensorization, algorithms, interfaces, tracking, AI, and digital infrastructures, as well as practices through which datafication is negotiated, appropriated, circumvented, or resisted. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between media and data: What changes when media do not merely transmit or represent information but continuously generate and process data? And how can established approaches in media theory contribute to the critical study of contemporary data cultures?
As a research-oriented seminar, the course combines close engagement with current scholarship with the discussion and development of research questions and analytical perspectives that can be applied to concrete cases. Course requirements include regular and active participation, careful preparation of the assigned readings for each session, an oral presentation, and two short thesis papers.
- Dozent/in: Christoph Borbach