'Big Data'

The first full day at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City starts for me with a session on sonic social media, where time is amplified by sound. We start with an introduction by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, who begin by reminding us about the ambient nature of sound, which was played with by the pioneers of ambient music and theorised by various scholars focussing on the ambient commons, the role of sound vibrations, and the distribution of sound across physical and digital space.

But the first paper is by Sal Hagen, whose focus is on …

The final speaker in this last paper session at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Theo Araujo, presenting the Macroscope project for investigating complex societal issues at scale. This brings together various key Dutch organisations in the humanities and social sciences, and seeks to develop a substantial number of methodological solutions and data observatories.

One aspect of this is to develop a Netherlands Media Corpus, bringing together conventional and emerging media sources (news, podcasts, television, social media) in a single corpus; building on this, it will then develop a Web & Media Diets Observatory that …

The next speaker at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin is Simon Kruschinski, whose focus is also on the comparison of different data donation approaches. There are many different data donation approaches, and these need to be compared more directly to identify the least burdensome and most user-friendly frameworks.

This study seeks to compare download-upload and automated data donation approaches, to examine patterns in who donates data, and to determine how participants experience trust and privacy in data donation processes. It draws on an online panel of some 7,000 participants in Germany which is linked with …

I’m chairing the final paper session for today at the 5th Data Donation Symposium at the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin, which starts with Hekmat Alrouh; his interest is in the study of grocery shopping behaviours in Dutch supermarkets, and this will involve data donations of loyalty card information.

To test this idea, he began with a GDPR request to two supermarkets for his own shopping data; those data packages arrived two weeks later, but they looked very different from what he could see on his loyalty apps. He then contacted the higher-level executives in these corporations directly, by guessing their email …

The second day at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by the fabulous Katrin Weller from GESIS, whose focus is on the European Union’s Digital Services Act and its implications for search studies. Much of this focusses on Article 40, which requires very large online platforms and search engines (VLOPs/VLOSEs) to provide data access to researchers – which is helpful, but not a perfect solution.

Very large here means over 45 million users in the EU (10% of the EU population), and some 25 platforms have been designated under the DSA by now; these include social …

And the final speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is Nadia Urban, whose focus is on algorithmic grooming and governance in social media cultures. Such processes require users to actively infer and internalise algorithmic norms: to learn the algorithm and bend it to their own ends.

But this cuts both ways: there is a conditioning mechanism in the everyday interaction between users and algorithms which also grooms the users. Algorithms produce social order in social media environments, while users are also active interpreters of these algorithm’s functionality; what is missing is a better …

The next speaker in this session at the Social Media & Society conference in Glasgow is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting our reflections on the experience of doing research using the Meta Content Library clean-room environment (and we have just published a new article in Political Communication Report on the clean-room model as well).

The MCL is Meta’s core access model for data from Meta platforms; it replaced the previous platform CrowdTangle in 2024, similarly offering a Web interface and API but transitioning to a clean-room environment within which all serious data work is meant to be conducted. Access …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Lucas Paulo da Silva, who reminds us that media outlets tend to chase large audiences. But can they do this across two ideological dimensions: economic and cultural? This might include left conservatives or right progressives, for instance.

Politically invested media actors tend to have very strongly correlated positions across issues, and so do party systems; if outlets are responsible to both economic and cultural dimensions, then this might make them less correlated over time, and this might also happen dynamically in response to …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Rupert Kiddle, whose interest is in encoder-produced news embeddings. This is an increasingly common technique, which helps analyse and categorise news articles both for internal journalistic purposes and for scholarly research. But they are not very sensitive to differences over time, and instead engage in a kind of temporal averaging of embeddings; this can be addressed, but remains difficult.

Most models also remain intransparent about their training data and weighting approaches, so there is a need to develop new approaches. This project draws …

The next speaker in this session at the 2026 International Communication Association conference in Cape Town is Magdalena Wojcieszak, who is presenting work towards a news content quality classifier. The consumption of online news is diverse: people consume traditional news article,s blog content, YouTube news videos, news podcasts, and many different formats.

But how do we assess the quality of all this content? There are various different measures for this, and many of them are problematic, not least for their domain- rather than article-level assessments and their conflation of quality with ideological bias; some also include factuality and other features …