Esther Weltevrede is an assistant professor of New Media and Digital Culture program, University of Amsterdam. Esther is coordinating the Digital Methods Initiative and is a member of Appstudies.org. Her research interests include digital methods, devices, platform studies, software studies, app studies and i infrastructure studies.
Digital research is often understood as data-driven. Yet the ways in which data are already infor... more Digital research is often understood as data-driven. Yet the ways in which data are already informed by specific analytical assumptions and inscriptions of the media in which they originate, circulate, or are being used is often neglected. The thesis intervenes in such focus on digital research in two ways. First, it offers a disciplinary contribution to the areas of digital social research and software studies through the development of a device-driven perspective. Such a perspective focuses on digital media both as object and as process, and is attentive to how digital media become operative in the digital research process. Second, a contribution to digital methods is made by introducing the notion of research affordances, which provide ways to operationalize the device-driven perspective and to discuss the implications of digital media as sources of data for the research process. The contributions are developed through empirical case studies examining the modes of research afford...
When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version ... more When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.
In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and soc... more In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and social media platforms and present a methodology to account for app–platform relations. Contrary to previous research on platforms and apps, we develop our approach from the perspective of apps based on a relational understanding of infrastructure. Our app-centric approach to platforms and infrastructure provides critical insights into (i) the kinds of third-party apps developed on the peripheries of social media platforms, (ii) the diverse practices and features supported and extended by those apps, and (iii) the messy and contingent nature of the relations between apps and social media platforms. Our approach provides insights into alternative forms of platform programmability beyond APIs and into social media-based ‘innovation’ app ecosystems driven by creative developer workarounds. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis of Android and iOS apps related to Facebook, In...
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘intern... more The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level. From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel metho...
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘intern... more The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level. From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel metho...
This work offers an approach to conceptualizing, demarcating and analyzing a national web. Instea... more This work offers an approach to conceptualizing, demarcating and analyzing a national web. Instead of defining a priori the types of websites to be included in a national web, the approach put forward here makes use of web devices (platforms and engines) that purport to provide (ranked) lists of URLs relevant to a particular country. Once gathered in such a manner, the websites are studied for their properties, following certain of the common measures (such as responsiveness and page age), and repurposing them to speak in terms of the health of a national web: Are sites lively, or neglected? The case study in question is Iran, which is special for the degree of Internet censorship undertaken by the state. Despite the widespread censorship, we have found a highly responsive Iranian web. We also report on the relationship between blockage, responsiveness and freshness, i.e., whether blocked sites are still up, and also whether they have been recently updated. Blocked yet blogging port...
CRC Media of Cooperation Working Paper Series No. 4, 2018
This paper discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focussing on their embeddedness an... more This paper discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focussing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach arises by paying close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infra-structural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, makes apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Engaging with and even staging these situations, therefore, allows for political-economic, social and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures can be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. The piece offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this over-arching framework, focussing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages and app connections. We conclude with nine p...
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, 2020
Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material g... more Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material grounding of the social. This chapter explores how recent engagements with platforms and digital sociology do more than just vindicate ANT's outlook of a flat socio-material account of the social without in-built levels of 'micro' and 'macro'. It argues that social media platforms reconfigure who or what can count as an actor, what counts as social and what as material, and renders these ambivalences a question of method. In a case study of tweets in the run up to the Brexit vote, this paper engages with the increasing automation of social life through bots, software enabled activity and cross-syndication services, and inquires into the specific socio-material constitution of the social in platform media and the limits their infrastructures put on ANT's foundational principle of "follow the actor". If the socio-material accomplishment is increasingly obfuscated, platform-based methodologies may involve different, unexpected and more difficult manoeuvres than straightforward acts of following.
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness a... more This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, make apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Therefore, engaging with and even staging these situations allows for political-economic, social, and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures to be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. This article offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this multi-situated approach, focusing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages, and app connections. We conclude with nine propositions that develop out of these studies as prompts for further research.
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time ca... more This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interplay of devices, users’ web activities and issues. What emerges are distinct forms of ‘realtimeness’ which are not external from but specific to devices, organized through socio-technical arrangements and practices of use. Realtimeness thus unflattens more general accounts of the real-time web and research, and draws attention to the agencies built into specific platform temporalities and the political economies of making real-time.
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking te... more The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconnections. This research aims to repurpose the Wayback Machine so as to trace and map transitions in linking technologies and practices in the blogosphere over time by means of digital methods and custom software. We are then able to create yearly network visualizations of the historical Dutch blogosphere (1999–2009). This approach allows us to study the emergence and decline of blog platforms and social media platforms within the blogosphere and it also allows us to investigate local blog cultures.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead ... more Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history
and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for
Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki
links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper see... more What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).
Digital research is often understood as data-driven. Yet the ways in which data are already infor... more Digital research is often understood as data-driven. Yet the ways in which data are already informed by specific analytical assumptions and inscriptions of the media in which they originate, circulate, or are being used is often neglected. The thesis intervenes in such focus on digital research in two ways. First, it offers a disciplinary contribution to the areas of digital social research and software studies through the development of a device-driven perspective. Such a perspective focuses on digital media both as object and as process, and is attentive to how digital media become operative in the digital research process. Second, a contribution to digital methods is made by introducing the notion of research affordances, which provide ways to operationalize the device-driven perspective and to discuss the implications of digital media as sources of data for the research process. The contributions are developed through empirical case studies examining the modes of research afford...
When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version ... more When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.
In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and soc... more In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and social media platforms and present a methodology to account for app–platform relations. Contrary to previous research on platforms and apps, we develop our approach from the perspective of apps based on a relational understanding of infrastructure. Our app-centric approach to platforms and infrastructure provides critical insights into (i) the kinds of third-party apps developed on the peripheries of social media platforms, (ii) the diverse practices and features supported and extended by those apps, and (iii) the messy and contingent nature of the relations between apps and social media platforms. Our approach provides insights into alternative forms of platform programmability beyond APIs and into social media-based ‘innovation’ app ecosystems driven by creative developer workarounds. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis of Android and iOS apps related to Facebook, In...
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘intern... more The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level. From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel metho...
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘intern... more The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level. From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel metho...
This work offers an approach to conceptualizing, demarcating and analyzing a national web. Instea... more This work offers an approach to conceptualizing, demarcating and analyzing a national web. Instead of defining a priori the types of websites to be included in a national web, the approach put forward here makes use of web devices (platforms and engines) that purport to provide (ranked) lists of URLs relevant to a particular country. Once gathered in such a manner, the websites are studied for their properties, following certain of the common measures (such as responsiveness and page age), and repurposing them to speak in terms of the health of a national web: Are sites lively, or neglected? The case study in question is Iran, which is special for the degree of Internet censorship undertaken by the state. Despite the widespread censorship, we have found a highly responsive Iranian web. We also report on the relationship between blockage, responsiveness and freshness, i.e., whether blocked sites are still up, and also whether they have been recently updated. Blocked yet blogging port...
CRC Media of Cooperation Working Paper Series No. 4, 2018
This paper discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focussing on their embeddedness an... more This paper discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focussing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach arises by paying close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infra-structural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, makes apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Engaging with and even staging these situations, therefore, allows for political-economic, social and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures can be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. The piece offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this over-arching framework, focussing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages and app connections. We conclude with nine p...
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, 2020
Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material g... more Data-intensive platform media bring up, but also reconfigure the question of the socio-material grounding of the social. This chapter explores how recent engagements with platforms and digital sociology do more than just vindicate ANT's outlook of a flat socio-material account of the social without in-built levels of 'micro' and 'macro'. It argues that social media platforms reconfigure who or what can count as an actor, what counts as social and what as material, and renders these ambivalences a question of method. In a case study of tweets in the run up to the Brexit vote, this paper engages with the increasing automation of social life through bots, software enabled activity and cross-syndication services, and inquires into the specific socio-material constitution of the social in platform media and the limits their infrastructures put on ANT's foundational principle of "follow the actor". If the socio-material accomplishment is increasingly obfuscated, platform-based methodologies may involve different, unexpected and more difficult manoeuvres than straightforward acts of following.
This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness a... more This article discusses methodological approaches to app studies, focusing on their embeddedness and situatedness within multiple infrastructural settings. Our approach involves close attention to the multivalent affordances of apps as software packages, particularly their capacity to enter into diverse groupings and relations depending on different infrastructural situations. The changing situations they evoke and participate in, accordingly, make apps visible and accountable in a variety of unique ways. Therefore, engaging with and even staging these situations allows for political-economic, social, and cultural dynamics associated with apps and their infrastructures to be investigated through a style of research we describe as multi-situated app studies. This article offers an overview of four different entry points of enquiry that are exemplary of this multi-situated approach, focusing on app stores, app interfaces, app packages, and app connections. We conclude with nine propositions that develop out of these studies as prompts for further research.
This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time ca... more This paper enquires into the politics of real-time in online media. It suggests that real-time cannot be accounted for as a universal temporal frame in which events happen, but explores the making of real-time from a device perspective focusing on the temporalities of platforms. Based on an empirical study exploring the pace at which various online media produce new content, we trace the different rhythms, patterns or tempos created by the interplay of devices, users’ web activities and issues. What emerges are distinct forms of ‘realtimeness’ which are not external from but specific to devices, organized through socio-technical arrangements and practices of use. Realtimeness thus unflattens more general accounts of the real-time web and research, and draws attention to the agencies built into specific platform temporalities and the political economies of making real-time.
The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking te... more The blogosphere has played an instrumental role in the transition and the evolution of linking technologies and practices. This research traces and maps historical changes in the Dutch blogosphere and the interconnections between blogs, which — traditionally considered — turn a set of blogs into a blogosphere. This paper will discuss the definition of the blogosphere by asking who the actors are which make up the blogosphere through its interconnections. This research aims to repurpose the Wayback Machine so as to trace and map transitions in linking technologies and practices in the blogosphere over time by means of digital methods and custom software. We are then able to create yearly network visualizations of the historical Dutch blogosphere (1999–2009). This approach allows us to study the emergence and decline of blog platforms and social media platforms within the blogosphere and it also allows us to investigate local blog cultures.
Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI '15, 2015
Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead ... more Collaborative content creation inevitably reaches situations where different points of view lead to conflict. We focus on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone may edit, where disputes about content in controversial articles often reflect larger societal debates. While Wikipedia has a public edit history
and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for
Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki
links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper see... more What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?).
1st 2016 Annual Conference of the Collaborative Research Center ‘Media of Cooperation’, 2016
This project sets out to advance the study of mobile apps at the intersection with platform studi... more This project sets out to advance the study of mobile apps at the intersection with platform studies and explores what both fields of study may learn from each other. A novel empirical methodology is developed to explore the intricate relations between mobile apps and social media platforms. Our findings suggest to think of apps as relational software entities, simultaneously situated and distributed. Apps exist as part of wider ecologies made up of programmable infrastructures and controlled data flows.
AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research (SPIR), 2016
The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘intern... more The panel engages with conceptual and methodological challenges within a specific area of ‘internet rules’, namely the space of mobile apps. Whereas the web was set out to function as a ‘generative’ and open technology facilitating the production of unanticipated services and applications, the growing popularity of social media platforms, and mobile apps is characterised by proprietary services that facilitate accessibility but obstruct transparency, tinkering, adjustment, and repurposing. This broader development from ‘generative’ technologies to ‘tethered’ devices and services has been referred to as ‘appliancization’ by Jonathan Zittrain (2008). In addition to Zittrain’s focus on the proliferation of proprietary technologies, we suggest that platform infrastructures create specific conditions for the emergence of app ecologies and that apps and platforms are mutually dependent on a technological and economic level.
From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel methodologies for app studies. So far, methodological approaches for studying apps have focused on end-user interfaces and how users interpret app affordances (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym 2015), qualitative analyses of their political economies and the politics of location (Dyer-Witheford 2014; Wilken and Bayliss 2015), their social norms of use (Humphreys 2007) or their affective capacities (Matviyenko et al. 2015). The empirical investigation of apps and their ecologies currently faces multiple challenges: First, in contrast to most data collected from web sites and platforms, user activities can neither be simply observed or scraped from front-end interfaces nor easily be collected via APIs. In order to access app data, researchers may need to participate in using the app, which only affords a partial view (e.g. in the case of Tinder, Snapchat, and messaging apps) thereby opening up a number of ethical concerns. Second, method development has to respond to apps’ fast update cultures. Like other internet-enabled technologies, apps are considered as services rather than products and have frequent development cycles, including design and features changes, which do not only require researchers to constantly adjust their tools and approaches, but which also make it particularly difficult to reconstruct the history of an app or its features.
This panel responds to these methodological challenges by advancing methodological approaches that all share a common device or medium-specific perspective, departing from the specific features of each app to attend to its data ecologies, political economies, practices, or histories, whilst reflecting critically on the relations between method and medium. One contribution advances digital methods for app analysis by mapping larger platform ecosystems in which apps emerge and thrive. It explores how apps reinforce, alter, and interfere in the interpretation of social media platforms and their features. Engaging with Facebook’s mobile app and its political economy, the second paper attends to the difficulties of getting access to historical app information whilst tracing relations between the introduction of new features and the advancement of the platform’s business model. A different approach to writing a microhistory of apps is offered in the third paper on the Twitter’s retweet button. Bringing together historical and ethnographic insights, this paper offers a detailed narrative of the becoming of a platform feature at the intersection of technicity, use practices, third-party apps and platform politics. The fourth and final paper focuses on the WeChat app and draws on ethnographic methods to explore the affordances of entanglement when the only way to study an app is by joining and participating in it.
All four papers approach apps not as discrete technologies, but as being situated and subject to distributed accomplishments of technicity, economics, practices, data, third parties, and platform politics. They connect platform studies and app studies by drawing attention to their intricate relations, e.g. in the case of platforms offering apps, apps built on top of platforms, apps facilitating practices that inform platforms, and apps functioning as platforms. The papers outline relations between and gaps in app and platform studies, as the study of platforms has identified the relevance of data circulation and the involvement of third parties, but has not explicitly asked how apps capitalise on platforms and vice-versa, or how they reinvent and inscribe into each other. From the perspective of app studies, adding a focus on platforms allows researchers to map the ecologies in which app data circulates as well as the regulatory rules and conditions for their development. The panel thus advances the field of app studies by exploring novel methods for empirical app research which allows to attend to the technicity, political economy, history, and enactment of app ecologies.
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Papers by Esther Weltevrede
and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for
Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki
links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
and discussion section for every article, the substance of these sections is difficult to phantom for
Wikipedia users interested in the development of an article and in locating which topics were most controversial. In this paper we present Contropedia, a tool that augments Wikipedia articles and gives insight into the development of controversial topics. Contropedia uses an efficient language agnostic measure based on the edit history that focuses on wiki
links to easily identify which topics within a Wikipedia article have been most controversial and when.
From this perspective, the panel explores a number of novel methodologies for app studies. So far, methodological approaches for studying apps have focused on end-user interfaces and how users interpret app affordances (McVeigh-Schultz and Baym 2015), qualitative analyses of their political economies and the politics of location (Dyer-Witheford 2014; Wilken and Bayliss 2015), their social norms of use (Humphreys 2007) or their affective capacities (Matviyenko et al. 2015). The empirical investigation of apps and their ecologies currently faces multiple challenges: First, in contrast to most data collected from web sites and platforms, user activities can neither be simply observed or scraped from front-end interfaces nor easily be collected via APIs. In order to access app data, researchers may need to participate in using the app, which only affords a partial view (e.g. in the case of Tinder, Snapchat, and messaging apps) thereby opening up a number of ethical concerns. Second, method development has to respond to apps’ fast update cultures. Like other internet-enabled technologies, apps are considered as services rather than products and have frequent development cycles, including design and features changes, which do not only require researchers to constantly adjust their tools and approaches, but which also make it particularly difficult to reconstruct the history of an app or its features.
This panel responds to these methodological challenges by advancing methodological approaches that all share a common device or medium-specific perspective, departing from the specific features of each app to attend to its data ecologies, political economies, practices, or histories, whilst reflecting critically on the relations between method and medium. One contribution advances digital methods for app analysis by mapping larger platform ecosystems in which apps emerge and thrive. It explores how apps reinforce, alter, and interfere in the interpretation of social media platforms and their features. Engaging with Facebook’s mobile app and its political economy, the second paper attends to the difficulties of getting access to historical app information whilst tracing relations between the introduction of new features and the advancement of the platform’s business model. A different approach to writing a microhistory of apps is offered in the third paper on the Twitter’s retweet button. Bringing together historical and ethnographic insights, this paper offers a detailed narrative of the becoming of a platform feature at the intersection of technicity, use practices, third-party apps and platform politics. The fourth and final paper focuses on the WeChat app and draws on ethnographic methods to explore the affordances of entanglement when the only way to study an app is by joining and participating in it.
All four papers approach apps not as discrete technologies, but as being situated and subject to distributed accomplishments of technicity, economics, practices, data, third parties, and platform politics. They connect platform studies and app studies by drawing attention to their intricate relations, e.g. in the case of platforms offering apps, apps built on top of platforms, apps facilitating practices that inform platforms, and apps functioning as platforms. The papers outline relations between and gaps in app and platform studies, as the study of platforms has identified the relevance of data circulation and the involvement of third parties, but has not explicitly asked how apps capitalise on platforms and vice-versa, or how they reinvent and inscribe into each other. From the perspective of app studies, adding a focus on platforms allows researchers to map the ecologies in which app data circulates as well as the regulatory rules and conditions for their development. The panel thus advances the field of app studies by exploring novel methods for empirical app research which allows to attend to the technicity, political economy, history, and enactment of app ecologies.