Panel discussion
Katie MacKinnon, University of Copenhagen
Johannes Paßmann & Lisa Gerzen, Ruhr University Bochum
Platform Histories: The politics of data afterlives
Katie MacKinnon, University of Copenhagen
Abstract
For the past 30 years, people have been growing up, existing, and producing data online. Their digital traces are distributed sporadically across what we might call the live and dead web; it’s stored in corporately owned digital spaces, institutional holdings, and web archives. How these traces are theorized, studied, aggregated, deployed, or destroyed deserves increased attention and care, because data is inextricably attached to people, both in the ways that it represents them and in the ways that they desire and deserve meaningful control over it. This research brings these ethical questions to the fore around how to theorize aging personal materials on the web that were made decades ago, particularly data that was produced by young, active, and eager participants in the world wide web in the 90s/00s, who were participating in very different platform ecosystems and connective contexts than we know today.
The Internet Archive, one of the largest and most prominent web archives, has been actively preserving the open web by crawling and archiving snapshots, making it available from anywhere in the world, since 1996. Web archiving initiatives and organizations are broadly engaged in “intervening and shaping the availability of information” (Ogden, 2020) as they provide access to parts of the web that have been deleted or abandoned by state and corporate owners. Here we can clearly see how web archives are critical knowledge infrastructures (Edwards, 2013; Bowker and Star, 2000; Karasti et al, 2016), but what kind of knowledge is produced through this form of data scraping and containment? Decisions about what types of data should persist - and in what form - are made without consultation, awareness, or consent from the people and communities who are intimately familiar with the creation, context and meaning of the original materials.
This is becoming an increasingly public issue, not just because of increasing awareness that the internet is aging and that linkrot is so prevalent, but also in moments of “platform crisis”: like Archive Team making a copy of the entirety of the platform GeoCities before it faced oblivion in 2009, or more recently when Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk. There are other systems in place that monitor and respond to “dying platforms” or “endangered data” (see: DPC Bit List), however The Internet Archive positions themselves as the only “guard” against a constantly vanishing digital culture. But what does “saving” in this way mean? Saving what? For whom? What do these archival impulses produce? My research grapples with these questions and grounds it in the empirical material I collected, where my participants describe not only their early internet memories, but also how they are grappling with the politics of data existing through web archives after a platform dies
Johannes Paßmann & Lisa Gerzen, Ruhr University Bochum
Abstract:
The presentation is concerned with the, or rather: a, history of online commenting on blogs, news websites and social media platforms and argues that web archives provide a specific, yet specifically limited source for the reconstruction of past practices. The presented research is part of the project Historical Technography of Online Commenting in the CRC Transformations of the Popular.
Johannes’ part of the presentation outlines a book he is currently working on. It tries to understand commenting in a web-historical perspective via changes in practices of including or excluding peripheral texts online (that are, when recognized as such, "paratexts"). The presentation is thus concerned with the question how practices – in this case practices of "sorting texts out" (or in) – can be reconstructed on the basis of archived websites: How can we better understand the "Transformations of the Popular", i.e. the practical and semantical changes on the meaning of participation of "the users", "our audience", "the people" and similar categories of "the many"? He argues that around 2010, with commenting becoming more and more popular, the semantics and practices of popularity have changed: More and more, the popular becomes problematized.
For this research, Lisa and Johannes have conducted interviews with relevant actors, e.g. early bloggers or journalists responsible for commenting sections of news websites. At the same time, their project has developed a software called “Technograph” that helps understand how archived websites have changed (in order to find out, e.g., when a news website launches an updated commenting section). Johannes and Lisa used these changed “artefacts” in interviews as “elicitation devices” (e.g. by showing interviewees how they changed their commenting sections over the past two decades).
Lisa’s part of the presentation focuses on the methodological background of the project. It addresses the general issue of researching past practices with web archive data – or “artefacts” – that are used in interviews. Her argument is: The project’s method combines digital data and traditional qualitative methods in a way that is not as new as it might sound: The computational data produced with web archives and the “Technograph” are used in the interviews in a similar way as established interview methods from Oral History, Visual Sociology and Anthropology use artefacts in interviews. However, it is this similarity to ‘traditional’ qualitative methods that also brings the specificity of the project’s “qualitative digital methods” to the fore. As a result, Johannes and Lisa argue that web archive data have a specific potential for the reconstruction of past practices that the presentation will outline.
About the speakers
Katie MacKinnon is a postdoctoral fellow on the ERC funded project, “Data Loss (DALOSS): the politics of disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies” at the University of Copenhagen (PI: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup). She researches the politics and ethics of data, specifically in preservation-oriented projects like web archives and in the production of internet histories and futures. Her work engages with critical feminist ethics of care methodologies while exploring ageing web materials across platforms of the live and dead web. Her forthcoming book PLATFORM HISTORIES examines digital traces and data afterlives of young peoples’ online participation in the 1990s-2000s through web archives. She developed a method called the ‘archive promenade’ that aims to bring people back in relation with their data on dead or forgotten web sites. She has published in Internet Histories, Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society (JICES), Jeunesse and Studies in Social Justice.
Johannes Paßmann is a Professor of History and Theory of Social Media and Platforms at Ruhr University Bochum (DE) and Principal Investigator at the Cooperative Research Center (CRC) Transformations of the Popular, funded by the German Research Foundation, both since 2021. Johannes was a research fellow at Locating Media, a postgraduate program at University of Siegen (DE), where he wrote an ethnographic PhD-thesis on practices of "liking" in the German-speaking Twitter (2011-2015), awarded as the best PhD-thesis of Siegen University and short-listed for the countrywide Opus Primum award. He worked as a lecturer in the Department of Media & Culture Studies at Utrecht University (NL), was visiting researcher at the Nordic Centre for Internet & Society (Oslo, NO) and visiting lecturer at the media studies department of the University of Basel (CH). Johannes current research is concerned with media praxeology, specifically in the context of web histories and web archives.
Lisa Gerzen is a research associate and doctoral candidate at Ruhr University Bochum (DE). In the CRC Transformations of the Popular, she works in a project on the history of online commenting that Johannes Paßmann leads. For her PhD thesis, she is currently developing a methodology that combines interviews with the usage of artefacts from web archives in order to reconstruct past practices. The goal of this methodology is to help triangulate web archive and interview data in a way that helps to understand the transformations of online commenting and its moderation. Lisa holds a master’s degree in Media Culture from University of Siegen (DE). She has presented at international conferences such as AoIR, RESAW or STS Italia and has published in Internet Histories.