van der Vlist, Fernando
Preferred name
van der Vlist, Fernando
Email
f.n.vandervlist@uu.nl
ORCID
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Publication Access status: Metadata only , Digital methods for sensory media research: Toolmaking as a critical technical practice‘Digital methods’ turn to medium-specific and online avenues for social and cultural research. While these approaches foster empirical media studies, it has become increasingly challenging to ‘follow the medium’ and ‘repurpose’ its methods. The prominence of sensory media such as ‘smart’ networked devices (e.g. mobile phones) in mundane practices and their infrastructural dependencies confront media scholars with highly contingent objects of study. Yet, studying such sensor-based devices is crucial, for they enable continuous and unnoticed monitoring of everyday (inter)activity. The Article suggests that developing digital methods for sensory media can be understood as specific ‘critical technical practice’ (CTP) by engaging with two toolmaking stories. It draws on and emphasises the fundamental similarity between CTP and digital methods which both aim at conjoining technical engagement and understanding with methodological reflection. The toolmaking stories explicate the making of and the limitations to developing digital methods for increasingly obfuscated mobile sensory media, exploring the possibilities of repurposing their functionality and data. They include building tools for app code analysis focused on apps’ capacity to track sensor data, as well as for ‘sensing’ and analysing network traffic of mobile devices in use. The featured toolmaking then unravels distinctive research affordances, that is, action possibilities for ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ modes of analysis grappling with the technicity of mobile sensory media and their data. We argue that toolmaking as CTP for sensory media studies implies engaging with these media as entangled infrastructures, examining not just their social, but also their technical ‘multi-situatedness’. This involves investigating the ‘liveliness’ of their data, or how it is generated, processed and made sense of. In conclusion, we discuss implications for ‘doing digital methods’ in sensory media research. Toolmaking itself becomes an inevitable form of media research and critique, inviting and challenging researchers to deploy the media’s situatedness for their investigations.Source Type:Article1 - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Publication Access status: Open Access , The technicity of platform governance: structure and evolution of Facebook’s APIsResearchers, policymakers, and competition and regulation authorities worldwide recognise application pro- gramming interfaces (APIs) for powering the digital economy and driving processes of datafication and platformisation. However, it is unclear how APIs tie into the power of, and gov- ernance by, large digital platforms. This article traces the rela- tionality between Facebook’s APIs, platform governance, and data strategy based on an empirical and evolutionary analy- sis. It examines a large corpus of (archived) developer pages and API reference documentation to determine the technicity of platform governance – the technical dimension and dynam- ics of how and what platforms like Facebook seek to govern. It traces how Facebook Platform evolved into a complex layered and interconnected governance arrangement, wherein techni- cal API specifications serve to enforce (changes to) platform policy and (data) strategy. Finally, the article discusses the significance of this technicity in specifying the material condi- tions for app and business development ‘on top of’ platforms and for maintaining infrastructural and evolutive power over their ecosystems.Source Type:BookSeries:Working paper series / SFB 1187 Medien der KooperationVolume number:203 49
