Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Mirko Tobias Schäfer
Utrecht University | UU · Department of Media and Culture Studies

PhD

About

58
Publications
13,603
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Introduction
Mirko Tobias Schäfer currently works at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. Mirko Tobias does research in Media Studies, Critical Data Studies and Science of Technology. He is interested in the social and epistemological impact of data practices and datafication. Their most recent publication is 'The Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data'.

Publications

Publications (58)
Article
Full-text available
In this article we describe our five-year research project on the notorious radical free speech service and fringe platform Gab. During these years we scraped an entire platform, prepared it into a dataset for analysis, and opened it up to a broader community of students and researchers. Each of these projects provides us not just with a small slic...
Chapter
Taking up the challenges of the datafication of culture, as well as of the scholarship of cultural inquiry itself, this collection contributes to the critical debate about data and algorithms. How can we understand the quality and significance of current socio-technical transformations that result from datafication and algorithmization? How can we...
Article
Full-text available
Participatory Design means recognizing that those who will be affected by a future technology should have an active say in its creation. Yet, despite continuous interest in involving people as future users and consumers into designing novel and innovative future technology, participatory approaches in technology design remain relatively underdevelo...
Chapter
Full-text available
Local governments in the Netherlands are increasingly undertaking data projects for public management. While the emergence of data practices and the application of algorithms for decision making in public management have led to a growing critical commentary, little actual empirical research has been conducted. Over the past few years, we have devel...
Article
Full-text available
This article analyzes deplatformization as an implied governance strategy by major tech companies to detoxify the platform ecosystem of radical content while consolidating their power as designers, operators, and governors of that same ecosystem. Deplatformization is different from deplatforming: it entails a systemic effort to push back encroachin...
Article
Full-text available
This contribution discusses the development of the Data Ethics Decision Aid (DEDA), a framework for reviewing government data projects that considers their social impact, the embedded values and the government's responsibilities in times of data-driven public management. Drawing from distinct qualitative research approaches, the DEDA framework was...
Article
Full-text available
As ever more data becomes available to work with, the use of digital tools within the humanities and social sciences is becoming increasingly common. These digital tools are often imported from other institutional contexts and were originally developed for other purposes. They may harbour concepts and techniques that stand in tension with tradition...
Article
Full-text available
Principles for good local governance in the digital society. A step towards a normative framework This article presents a normative framework for good local governance in the digital society. We build on the five principles of Frank Hendriks (laid down in an article in Urban Affairs Review in 2014): participation, effectiveness, learning ability, p...
Article
Full-text available
This article proposes a consideration of today’s discourses on ‘big data’ from a media archaeological point of view, confronting such discourses with those surrounding projects for large- scale image archives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Collections of photographs, stereographs and films were thought of as trustworthy and unbias...
Article
Full-text available
Interview with Mirko Tobias Schäfer (Utrecht University) with Eef Masson and Karin van Es.
Conference Paper
Full-text available
While the use of tools is not new for the sciences, the, traditionally, qualitative research methods driven humanities were using tools scarcely. The increasing use of computer-aided methods within the humanities has been summarized as 'computational turn' [36], digital humanities [4, 7], eResearch [25] and/or eHumanities [41]. In the Humanities, s...
Article
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This special issue of Internet Policy Review is the first to bring together the best policy-oriented papers presented at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers(AoIR). This issue is anchored in the 2017 conference in Tartu, Estonia, which was organisedaround the theme of networked publics. The seven papers span issues conce...
Article
Full-text available
The Datafied Society: Studying Culture Through Data, edited by Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Karin van Es, is an open access anthology of academic debates and reflections on the theories, methods, practices, and ethics of digital data research from the interpretive and critical perspectives of humanities scholars. Through the contributions of 33 scholar...
Book
As machine-readable data comes to play an increasingly important role in everyday life, researchers find themselves with rich resources for studying society. The novel methods and tools needed to work with such data require not only new knowledge and skills, but also a new way of thinking about best research practices. This book critically reflects...
Book
Full-text available
The large corpus of empirical data and available tools for data collection and analysis are changing the ways knowledge is produced. For the humanities, this transformation requires not only that we must critically inquire into how technology affects our understanding of knowledge and how it alters our epistemic processes, but that we also need to...
Article
Full-text available
The past several years have seen a huge number of publications, conferences and campaigns on “land grabbing” or large-scale acquisition of land, most often in Africa. Land-grabbing became a fiercely debated issue and the attention rapidly evolved into a real hype which has generated a wealth of knowledge. This global land grab awareness has coincid...
Chapter
Piracy is among the most prevalent and vexing issues of the digital age. In just the past decade, it has altered the music industry beyond recognition, changed the way people watch television, and made a dent in the buisness of the film and software industries. From MP3 files to recipes from French celebrity chefs to the jokes of American stand-up...
Article
Full-text available
There have been long-standing discussions of “participation” in political theory and media studies, and this article organises a discussion on the “participatory turn” in contemporary culture. Questions that are raised, are: To what degree has the rise of networked computing encouraged us to reimagine the public sphere? If we can move this discussi...
Book
p>In the wake of the recent far-reaching changes in the use and accessibility of technology in our society, the average person is far more engaged with digital culture than ever before. They are not merely subject to technological advances but actively use, create, and mold them in everyday routines – connecting with loved ones and strangers throug...
Chapter
Sind jene künstlerischen Konzepte, die im 20. Jahrhundert mit dem Begriff der Subversion operierten, heute veraltet? Wie werden sie aktuell erneuert? Welche Effekte haben die gegenwärtigen medialen Umbrüche auf die verschiedenen künstlerischen Felder und ihre politische Bedeutung? Existiert eine wirksame künstlerische Subversion überhaupt? Und, wen...
Chapter
In this chapter, we first consider the growing cultural significance of software as a motive for having a closer look at software production. We then show how networked computing has stimulated new practices of technical creation that question the traditional logic of engineering; open source software development serves as an example. Consequently,...
Article
Over the past decade a culture of user participation has developed on a global scale contributing to the development of software as well as changing, commenting, creating and distributing media content. With the personal computer, the internet and software, users have powerful production means at their hands and are able to connect to social worlds...
Article
The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerg...
Article
After the adaptation of technology and user participation have been examined, Chapter 5 will deal with the resulting dynamics. The extended culture industry develops different dynamics to respond to user participation. A conservative reaction is defined as confrontation, often recognizable in the actions of industries whose business model is severe...
Article
After the adaptation of technology and user participation have been examined, Chapter 5 will deal with the resulting dynamics. The extended culture industry develops different dynamics to respond to user participation. A conservative reaction is defined as confrontation, often recognizable in the actions of industries whose business model is severe...
Article
Chapter 4 demonstrates design and appropriation by way of case examples ranging from explicit participation (game console hacking) to implicit user participation in information management processes. These cases illustrate to what extent computer technology and software, in tandem with the Internet, create the possibility of countless concatenations...
Article
Chapter 4 demonstrates design and appropriation by way of case examples ranging from explicit participation (game console hacking) to implicit user participation in information management processes. These cases illustrate to what extent computer technology and software, in tandem with the Internet, create the possibility of countless concatenations...
Article
Chapter 1 examines how participation is framed as social progress through technological advancement. It scrutinizes the establishment of participation as a great legend of computer and Internet and reveals how opinion leaders (policy makers, activists, artists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, engineers, etc.) contribute to a rhetoric that refers t...
Article
Chapter 1 examines how participation is framed as social progress through technological advancement. It scrutinizes the establishment of participation as a great legend of computer and Internet and reveals how opinion leaders (policy makers, activists, artists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, engineers, etc.) contribute to a rhetoric that refers t...
Article
The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerg...
Article
The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerg...

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