Engaging Platforms in Open Scholarship/Understanding Platforms

Groundings, Foundations, and Introductory Texts

Adema, Janneke, Gary Hall, Fitzpatrick Kathleen, Aventurier Pascal, and Parry David. 2015. Really, We’re Helping To Build This . . . Business: The Academia.edu Files. Liquid Books. http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/106236504/The%20Academia_edu%20Files.

In this compilation of files, 11 authors critique Academia.edu and other dot-com sites that present themselves as open access platforms while taking investments from venture capitalists they will eventually have to pay back. The authors see Academia.edu as an extremely influential company that is poised to collect—and potentially exploit—a tremendous amount of data. They argue that Academia.edu’s efficacy and longevity may ultimately be compromised by its profit-driven model and the kinds of actions that such a model can engender. The authors see sites like Academia.edu as a problematic form of academic social media in which increased user participation builds social capital within a network of competition for recognition, often addressing this function in terms of the Foucauldian “technologies of the self.” Finally, the authors gesture toward theorizing a more economically progressive academic social networking site that does not rely on venture capital investments, heralding the idea of commonly owned, open-source, and economically and socially progressive social media, which seeks to nurture/interact with scholarly research as a commons.

Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (Germany). 2017. “Making Sense of the Digital Society.” Lecture Series. Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society. https://www.hiig.de/en/digital-society-lecture-series/.

This resource links to a series of lectures jointly organized by the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and the Federal Agency for Civic Education (in Germany). Each lecture in this series focuses on an aspect that relates to the ‘digital society.’ Topics include artificial intelligence, spyware and surveillance, digital capitalism, and so on. Although not exclusively focused on platforms per say, many of the concepts and topics found across the lectures are relevant and foundational to developing an understanding of platforms, as well as their effects and affects.

Apperley, Thomas, and Jussi Parikka. 2018. “Platform Studies’ Epistemic Threshold.” Games and Culture 13 (4): 349–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412015616509.

This work is situated at the intersection of game studies, media theory, and cultural practice. The authors advocate for a more critical and inclusive approach to platforms and platform studies, one that moves beyond hyperbole and early-adopter optimism. The authors offer tenets from the broad field of media archaeology as one way forward, proposing that the field’s analytical and critical interests intersect with platform studies in productive ways. Notably, Apperley and Parikka argue that media archaeology, like platform studies, seeks to challenge ‘black box’ thinking about platforms. However, unlike much of the work in platform studies at the time, media archaeology aims to uncover and interrogate the archives that make up a media device. Thus, Apperley and Parikka advocate for the consideration of platforms not just as technologies but as a set of choices, techniques, practices, and assumptions–that is, for platforms as archives. They conclude by emphasizing the need to move beyond industry-focused narratives and engage with the broader cultural, social, and historical contexts in which platforms exist, ultimately enriching the understanding of digital media and its evolution.

Burgess, Jean. 2021. “Platform Studies.” In Creator Culture, edited by Stuart Cunningham and David Craig, 21–38. New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479890118.003.0005.

In this introductory chapter, Burgess provides an overview of ‘platforms’ as a concept and ‘paradigm’ before delving into different approaches to, as well as some guidelines for the study of platforms. From utilizing a web scraping tool to build a video corpus of YouTube videos in order to study how creators were engaging in debates and activism, to examining YouTube’s algorithms in order to better understand how platforms shape culture (which involved differentiating between what algorithms actually do and what algorithms are perceived to be doing by a platform’s users), Burgess offers succinct entry points into methods that vary in terms of their approach and assumptions. Other methods discussed include the combination of social network analysis and close readings of comments posted on a corpus of videos associated with music group ‘Das Racist’ (Murthy and Sharma 2019), as well as hybrid digital methods such as the ‘walkthrough,’ which involves a ‘systematic’ and ‘forensic’ walk through a platform in order to closely examine and document a platform’s use of design, appeals, and flows.

Burgess, Jean, Kath Albury, Anthony McCosker, and Rowan Wilken. 2022. Everyday Data Cultures. Polity Press.

Burgess et al. propose the conceptual framework of everyday data cultures to explore how the conversion of everyday activities into data happens at the ground level, and how the thoughts, practices, and feelings of users of technology influence processes of datafication. Drawing from scholarship in cultural studies, the authors focus on everyday life because it is the social space in which culture (understood as a collective system of meanings and values) is contested and transformed through social and material practice. This framework challenges some critical approaches to data and datafication that deny the agency of internet users due to their pathological framing of big tech characterized by addiction and behavioural manipulation. In the book, the authors use this framework to analyze everyday data intimacies (the formation of intimate relationships with and through data), everyday data literacies (the development of skills to work with data), and everyday data publics (how everyday data practices occur in communities and in public).

Couldry, Nick. "The Myth of ‘Us’: Digital Networks, Political Change, and the Production of Collectivity." Information, Communication & Society, vol. 18, no. 6, 2015, pp. 608-626. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.979216.

Drawing on theories and critiques from studies in sociology and new media, Couldry examines assumptions that digital networks are transforming ‘the social’ by fostering new representations of togetherness, which Couldry terms “the myth of ‘us’.” Couldry argues that this social construction of togetherness is intentional, motivated by financial and commercial interests in scraping and selling the data derived from networking sites that rely on the myth to be successful. Although Couldry seems to agree with the premise that digital networking sites matter in a social sense, Couldry also asserts that there is a need to look harder at the longer-term implications of these sites, particularly in terms of policy-making (or breaking), if we are to understand not just why these sites may matter but also how.

Eve, Martin Paul, and Jonathan Gray, eds. 2020. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

The chapters in this edited volume examine the intersections between past and ongoing discussions, as well as future imaginings, of openness and scholarly communications. Divided into six sections, each chapter is intended to serve as a short introduction to different perspectives and approaches. The book opens with a section focused on intersections between global inequalities, legacies of colonialism, and open access. The second section considers how knowledge itself is understood and discussed, and how this understanding shapes understandings of open and digital scholarly publishing. In the third section, contributions focus on the open dissemination of research, and the politics and publics that this work entails. Chapters in the fourth section of the book focus on archives and preservation. The fifth section focuses on infrastructures and platforms, with chapters demonstrating how platforms and infrastructures that may enable ‘open’ in some ways, while enacting forms of enclosure in other ways. The sixth and final section focuses on ideas of a global community in scholarly communication. In addition to bringing together perspectives from the social sciences and humanities, the Editors make an effort to retain tensions between chapters, seeing these as vital (perhaps more so) to the edited collection as the places in which there is agreement. The hope is that in doing so, the edited volume will represent an archive of “practical initiatives,” preserved as “history” (Eve and Gray 2020, p. 10).

Gillespie, Tarleton. 2010. “The Politics of ‘Platforms.’” New Media & Society 12 (3): 347–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809342738.

Gillespie’s article in New Media and Society is a discourse analysis, in the broad sense that it focuses on connecting language in use—the term ‘platforms,’ in this case—to social and political contexts in order to better understand its effects and affects. Gillespie argues that ‘platform,’ as a term, is misleading. Gillespie points out that what we call a ‘thing’ links it to what we see as its precedents and antecedents, which drives the conditions and regulatory paradigms that surround and further shape what that ‘thing’ is, as well as what it can do—or, importantly, cannot. From there, Gillespie concludes that the imprecision and flexibility of ‘platform,’ as a term, ultimately works in the best interests of companies and firms who exploit the flexibility it affords in order to enjoy certain rules and regulations that are financially beneficial while evading those that are not. Further, the slipperiness of the term ‘platform’ makes it very difficult for members of the public to hold companies accountable, develop regulatory frameworks, and otherwise impose restrictions or conditions.

Gillespie, Tarleton. 2014. “The Relevance of Algorithms.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot, 167–94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

As algorithms increasingly select the information that is most relevant to people, they produce and certify knowledge built on a specific assumption of what knowledge is. Gillespie calls for interrogating public relevance algorithms, which select what is most relevant from a corpus of data with traces of people’s activities, preferences, and expressions. The author suggests evaluating these algorithms based on six dimensions: 1) the patterns of inclusion (and exclusion) of information into databases, 2) the cycles of anticipation (of users’ behaviours), 3) the evaluation of relevance and the criteria by which algorithms determine what is relevant, 4) the promise of algorithmic visibility, 5) the entanglement with users’ practices to suit or question the algorithms they depend on, and 6) the production of calculated publics. The author concludes that algorithms are not only computer codes but a new socially constructed knowledge logic that selects relevant information for users based on proceduralized choices designed by human operators to recognize patterns across collected social traces.

Gillespie, Tarleton. 2017. “The Platform Metaphor, Revisited.” Culture Digitally. http://culturedigitally.org/2017/08/platform-metaphor/.

Gillespie examines how the platform metaphor has extended its meaning away from what it now describes. Originally, it referred to a programmable infrastructure that allowed to run and build other software, such as operating systems or information services that provide APIs for developers. Nowadays, the term tends to describe an architecture from which to speak or act (similar to a train platform or a political stage). This current use of the word platform highlights aspects such as connection and user participation, but hides four aspects of platforms: 1) they are not flat spaces of exchange, but multi-layered landscapes where some activities are more available and visible than others; 2) they consist of multiple, diverse and even overlapping or contentious communities; 3) the responsibility platforms have towards their users; and 4) the labour needed to produce and maintain their services. Gillespie concludes that scrutinizing the platform metaphor can show what it fails to highlight, how it serves the interests of the metaphor’s practitioners, and the design interventions that can address the gaps and obscurities in platforms.

Poell, Thomas, David Nieborg, and José van Dijck. 2019. “Platformisation.” Internet Policy Review 8 (4). https://policyreview.info/concepts/platformisation.

Poell et al. contextualize and define the concept of platformization drawing from research in software studies, business studies, critical political economy, and cultural studies. The paper starts by tracing the history of the word platform, which is defined as a (re-)programmable digital infrastructure that facilitates interactions among end users and sellers through data collection, processing, monetisation, and circulation. The authors then explain that the scholarly community has moved from discussions of platforms as things to analyzing platformization as a process, which they define as “the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms” (1). This definition suggests that the process of platformization happens along three institutional dimensions (data infrastructures, markets, and governance) that, if analyzed together, enable a comprehensive understanding of how this process transforms key societal sectors.

Van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. “The Platform Society as a Contested Concept.” In The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, 7–30. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Van Dijck et al. detail the clashes in the concept of the platform society as it is shaped by a multiplicity of actors from the market, the state, and civil society. The authors define the platform society as an emerging society that channels social, economic, and interpersonal traffic through a global online platform ecosystem fueled by data and organized by algorithms. As platforms become more ingrained in social and political structures, the authors propose studying platforms in the micro-level of single platforms, the meso-level of a platform ecosystem, and the geopolitical macro-level of platform societies. The authors analyze the Big Five platform companies (Facebook, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple) to explain how they have come to own the digital infrastructure of the platform ecosystem. At the macro-level, these American companies inscribe a specific set of libertarian norms and values in their algorithms, policies, and business models that often remain implicit until they try to reach European markets, causing a clash between neoliberal market values and democratic collective values.

Van Dijck, José, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal. 2018. “Platform Mechanisms.” In The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, 31–48. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

This chapter examines three primary mechanisms used by platforms like Facebook, Google, and Uber—datafication, commodification, and selection—to shape activities across different spheres of life. Datafication mechanisms are those that convert various aspects of the world (such as demographics and user interactions) into data. Commodification involves transforming data and user activities into tradable commodities within multi-sided markets. Selection mechanisms enable platforms to curate content and influence user behavior through personalization and reputation metrics. The authors highlight the socio-economic impact of these mechanisms, emphasizing the need to reconsider assumptions that platforms, especially those like Facebook, actively reflect the social relations in our everyday lives when, in effect, they may actually steer and construct these relations. Despite this, the authors conclude that though an examination of these different mechanisms remains critical, equally critical is the understanding that platforms are deeply reliant on users. As such, the impact of collective user behaviour must also be considered, particularly if the outcomes of platformization are to be mitigated or shaped differently.

Infrastructures Meet Platforms (and vice versa)

Barnett, Tully. 2019. “Read in Browser: Reading Platforms, Frames, Interfaces, and Infrastructure.” Participations 16 (1). https://www.participations.org/16-01-15-barnett.pdf.

This paper considers what happens when physical books encounter digital platforms (e.g., by becoming ‘digitized’). Barnett importantly asks readers to consider what is gained and lost, and how readers and scholars might talk about, theorize, and understand this process. Arguing that this engagement must take into account the broader environments within which digitization occurs, Barnett suggests turning in part to work already underway by scholars in critical infrastructure studies. Critical infrastructure studies is frequently concerned with the ways in which the distribution of sites, processes, people, media, and things are intertwined with power, thus offering a way forward for those interested in moving beyond access/preservation debates to consider other equally important and influential factors impacting the packaging, distribution, and consumption of digital books.

Chan, Shirley, and Ann-Sofie Klareld. 2022. “Platform or Infrastructure or Both at Once? Detangling the Two Concept’s Knotty Cross-Articulations.” In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, May 29 - June 1, 2022. Vol. 27. Oslo Metropolitan University: Information Research. https://doi.org/10.47989/colis2205.

Writing for the audience of an international conference of library and information science scholars, the authors explore the conceptual entanglement of "platform" and "infrastructure" through a focus on the places in the literature where descriptions for the concepts overlap (or are “cross-articulated”). Through this process, Chan and Klareld identify four forms of cross-articulation at work: (1) platforms adopting the characteristics of infrastructures; (2) infrastructures adopting the logic of platforms; (3) the simultaneous adoption by platforms and infrastructures of each other’s properties; and (4) the adoption of roles that shape and standardise patterns of social action.The authors call for greater attention to cross-articulations of “infrastructures” and “platforms,” proposing that such attention is essential for scholars and practitioners in library and information studies who are well-poised to support ongoing efforts to understand how infrastructures and platforms are shaping information and knowledge environments.

Gómez Cruz, Edgar, and Ramaswami Harindranath. 2020. “WhatsApp as ‘Technology of Life’: Reframing Research Agendas.” First Monday 25 (12). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10405.

Gómez Cruz and Harindranath discuss the results of an ethnographic study on the use of WhatsApp in Mexico City to examine how it mediates the lived experience of individuals, families, and communities. The authors argue that, in several countries of the Global South, WhatsApp has become a technology of life due to its everydayness and pervasive presence in diverse life experiences. In the Mexican context, where 60% of the population uses WhatsApp, the app is a central infrastructure for communication because it is used as a technology for work, digital kinship, security, and micromanaging. Given the diversity of uses, WhatsApp is not only reinforcing existing forms of socialization but also facilitating new ones. Based on these results, the authors suggest two interventions for reframing research agendas on the use of social media and digital technologies. First, they highlight the limitations of data-driven research as it prioritises platforms that have a public API and prevents research questions on the cultural context and the use of technologies, particularly in the Global South. Second, the authors call for more ethnographic studies of technologies of life to examine the socio-historical context and cultures that shape how these technologies are used and experienced in everyday life.

Guldi, Jo. 2020. “Scholarly Infrastructure as Critical Argument: Nine Principles in a Preliminary Survey of the Bibliographic and Critical Values Expressed by Scholarly Web-Portals for Visualizing Data.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 14 (3). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000463/000463.html.

Guldi explores the values behind infrastructure-building in the humanities and social sciences as infrastructures are increasingly created and used to access, analyze, and visualize cultural data. Despite its importance and the intellectual labour behind it, infrastructure building is usually downplayed because it is not considered a scholarly activity. To counter this misconception, Guldi argues that the development of infrastructures is informed by an engagement with certain values that will structure and constrain the format of the arguments produced over them. Therefore, the author considers the design and building of infrastructure as a possible act of critique depending on the values it follows. Guldi describes two types of principles that guide the values of infrastructure building: bibliographic (consisting of transparency, interoperability, neutrality with respect to technical literacy, creation of knowledge about the social world, primacy of pattern recognition, replicability, and plurality of humanistic desires) and critical (consisting of community ownership and the belief that the democratization of access to information breeds better democracy). Outlining the values present in the building of infrastructure makes visible the intellectual engagement and critical thought behind this process so it can be accepted as a scholarly contribution. Guldi also calls the builders of infrastructure to theorize about the choices made during this process to highlight how they engaged with the concerns of their discipline, which might require refining the values suggested in this article.

Jordan, Katy. 2019. “From Social Networks to Publishing Platforms: A Review of the History and Scholarship of Academic Social Network Sites.” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2019.00005.

Jordan offers a survey of the history and distinguishing features of popular academic social networking sites, as well as a comprehensive overview of existing scholarship on what she identifies as the three leading platforms of this kind: Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley. Jordan organizes her analysis according to five overarching themes in this body of scholarship, maintaining that each is further informed by questions about whether academic social networking sites are primarily publishing platforms or platforms meant to facilitate social connections. In the process, she also summarizes apparent tensions in both others’ work and in her own findings. The survey closes with a few additional observations about the impact of factors such as neoliberalization and the increasing need to understand how academic social networking sites are used and studied in non-Western contexts.

Liu, Alan, Jonathan Gray, and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger. 2022. “Critical Infrastructure Studies Bibliography.” Critical Infrastructure Studies.Org (blog). 2022. https://cistudies.org/critical-infrastructures-bibliography/.

The Critical Infrastructure Studies Bibliography compiles a wide array of sources from the growing field of critical studies of infrastructure. The aim of this bibliography is to set out the shape and, possibly, boundaries of the emerging field. Included in this bibliography are resources that touch on diverse aspects such as theory, philosophy, politics, ethics, and artistic approaches to infrastructure. Edited by Alan Liu, Jonathan Gray, and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, this bibliography serves as both a resource and a critical tool.

Liu, Alan. 2018. “Toward Critical Infrastructure Studies.” NASSR: 1-22. https://cistudies.org/wp-content/uploads/Toward-Critical-Infrastructure-Studies.pdf.

Liu introduces the idea of critical infrastructure studies as a kind of critical interpretation unique to the digital humanities. He argues that infrastructure is increasingly becoming intermeshed with culture in ways no longer fully describable in traditional schemes of ideology-critique. Therefore, the digital humanities are uniquely placed to interpret and critique culture at the level of infrastructure, understood as the technological setting that enables and constraints the fulfillment of human experience. The potential of critique in the digital humanities arises from their proximity to, and even partnership with, their objects of critique, such as technological infrastructure. This proximity allows them to get close enough to the system to know its critical points of inflection, difference, and change, as well as to connect higher education to the workings of other institutions. Some suggested approaches for studying these institutions and their infrastructure are the neoinstitutionalist analysis of organizations, the social constructionist approach to organizational technology, and the maintenance, repair and care movement. Liu concludes that digital humanities can act about larger social issues by creating ethical infrastructures and practices that make a social impact through their position between academic institutions and other social institutions.

Pawlicka-Deger, Urszula. 2021. “Infrastructuring Digital Humanities: On Relational Infrastructure and Global Reconfiguration of the Field.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 37 (2): 534–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab086.

Pawlicka-Deger examines how the social dimensions of global knowledge infrastructure influence and constrain the development of global digital humanities (DH). She argues that global infrastructural gaps limit the formation of a global DH field. Drawing from science and technology studies, the author analyzes how infrastructure inequities in connection, standardization, and access lead to the homogenization of scholarly methods and outcomes, underrepresentation of cultural heritage data from Indigenous communities and ethnic minorities, and a divide in knowledge production between the Global North and South. To address some of these discrepancies, Pawlicka-Deger proposes infrastructuring DH, which entails the creation of an inclusive network of unique nodes of local DH communities built on top of the geopolitical system of infrastructure so each community can evenly access, use, and share digital knowledge resources while working with local materials.

Pawlicka-Deger, Urszula. 2021. “The Multiformity of Infrastructure.” DH Infra (blog). March 29, 2021. https://dhinfra-org.github.io/197/the-multiformity-of-infrastructure/.

In this blog post, Pawlicka-Deger discusses how the multiformity of infrastructure highlights how it forms social, cultural, and intellectual configurations. She argues that infrastructure is composed of interrelated social and technical components that reveal who is connected, who is enabled to participate, and whose practices are facilitated in social configurations. In addition to these analytical dimensions of infrastructure, Pawlicka-Deger adds its temporariness, as illustrated by the sharing of information on COVID-19 during the pandemic, which was only available in open access for a limited time period. This case, among others explored in the post, reveals that infrastructure is dynamic and socio-material, as opposed to fixed, neutral, and technical. Therefore, it can be studied in the digital humanities by conceptualising, interrogating, and making infrastructural components.

Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, Paul N. Edwards, and Christian Sandvig. 2018. “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook.” New Media & Society, 20 (1): 293-310. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816661553.

Plantin et al. explore how to connect infrastructure studies with platform studies to better understand digital media. Emerging from science and technology studies, infrastructure studies focus on essential, widely shared sociotechnical systems characterized by their ubiquity, reliability, invisibility, and gateways. In contrast, platform studies, emerging from media studies, focus on how computing devices and software environments influence the application software built upon them. Platforms and infrastructures are similar, but they differ in scale and scope, as platforms are centrally controlled and designed (usually by corporations), while infrastructures tend to be widely accessible and regulated by governments. However, this distinction is not straightforward. Some platforms (such as Google or Facebook) are increasingly becoming infrastructures due to their ubiquity and invisibility, while some infrastructures have been “splintered”, which has given rise to alternatives that privatize the wealth and responsibility to private corporations. Using the two perspectives of infrastructure and platform studies can help describe conflicts between infrastructures and platforms across various sectors.

Waters, Donald J. 2023. “The Emerging Digital Infrastructure for Research in the Humanities.” International Journal on Digital Libraries 24 (2): 87–102. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00332-3.

Waters explores the role of digital infrastructure in the humanities research workflow, which consists of six iterative steps: collecting, cataloging, transcribing/translating, identifying (named entities), analyzing/interpreting, and publishing. The article describes how digital infrastructure supports each of these steps, often in the form of specialized databases. Waters suggests that the application of digital technologies in the humanities workflow has given rise to new divisions of labour in humanities research that allow scholars to generate research results beyond an article, monograph, or critical edition. As these infrastructure projects have become widespread in the humanities, Waters suggests three improvements: increasing interoperability, accommodating more diverse audiences, and ensuring these projects’ financial and institutional sustainability.