FSP 3: Publications

This book presents emerging themes and future directions in the interdisciplinary field of critical data studies. In nine collectively authored chapters 75 contributors engage in dialogues on key themes relating to Data Power. Across the chapters we explore five cross-cutting concerns: (1) the responsibilisation of individuals and communities through processes of datafication, (2) the abilities of individuals and communities to respond to data power, (3) the endeavour to design responsible data-driven systems, (4) questions around what responsible data studies research may look like, and (5) how we as critical data studies scholars can become response-able to each other. The book is an invaluable dialogue between disciplines that introduces readers to cutting edge arguments within the field. It will be a key resource for scholars and students who require a guide to this rapidly evolving area of research.

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Algorithms have risen to become one, if not the central technology for producing, circulating, and evaluating knowledge in multiple societal arenas. In this book, scholars from the social sciences, humanities, and computer science argue that this shift has, and will continue to have, profound implications for how knowledge is produced and what and whose knowledge is valued and deemed valid. To attend to this fundamental change, the authors propose the concept of algorithmic regimes and demonstrate how they transform the epistemological, methodological, and political foundations of knowledge production, sensemaking, and decision-making in contemporary societies. Across sixteen chapters, the volume offers a diverse collection of contributions along three perspectives on algorithmic regimes: the methods necessary to research and design algorithmic regimes, the ways in which algorithmic regimes reconfigure sociotechnical interactions, and the politics engrained in algorithmic regimes.

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The open access book is based on the 3.5-year research project DATAFIED, which investigated the transformation of schools through the increasing relevance of data-intensive technologies. In four sub-projects, research was conducted at the interfaces of teaching practices, school management, school control and software development. The book is intended as an invitation to reflect on various futures of datafied schools and discusses the ambivalences, tensions and ruptures in the production, collection, distribution and use of data in the German school system. The authors analyse, for example, the complex interplay of powerful data infrastructures and diverse data practices in school management; the tense relationships of school information systems between burden-relief, support-autonomy and individualisation-collectivisation; and the effect of pandemic-related school closures on the use of digital technologies. In a "workshop report", the authors offer insights into the methodological challenges of datafication research.

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