Each year, the music service Spotify encourages its users to share curated stories based on repackaged data extracted from them. In 2023, ‘Spotify Wrapped’ took the form of an in-app experience in which users were re-presented with listening behaviour through lists of their top played songs, artists, podcasts and genres as well as the total number of minutes listened to. Along with these quantified articulations of listening data, Spotify offered new curated data stories, including users’ ‘listening characters’ (called ‘Me in 2023’) and ‘sound town.’ We choose to approach questions of how people perceive and encounter their ‘Spotified’ selves and approach the normative assumptions baked into these data stories by bringing together Spotify users as co-analysts in a creative workshop to interrogate their ‘Wrapped’.

This experimental session takes the form of a short-form workshop (1.5 hour) in which AoIR delegates explore the links between their own ‘Wrapped’ data, identity, and music taste. The proposed workshop format has a dual purpose: First of all, the workshop allows AoIR delegates to critically and creatively explore ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and associated data. At the same time, the workshop serves a pedagogical purpose as we demonstrate the value of using interactive and craft-based methods to investigate lived experiences of data cultures. It is our hope that AoIR delegates will find this useful as educators too. Across the 1.5-hour workshop, participants will engage in creative exercises using material objects, creative tools, and critical reflection.

There are four core components to this experimental session:

• Context: Introducing ‘Wrapped’ and academic approaches to algorithms (see Bishop & Kant, 2023; Bucher, 2019; Cheney-Lippold, 2011; Seaver, 2023)
• Walkthrough: Analysing the Spotify interface through a modified version of the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018)
• Creative artefact: Assembling a ‘Spotify data selfie’ (Burgess et al., 2022) while a musician plays live music
• Discussion: Determining the value of creative and engaged research.

The session finds inspiration in the methodological approaches of Bishop and Kant (2023) and Reading (2021) used in projects that explored the ‘digital self’ and ‘right to belonging’ respectively. The design of the workshop is guided by an attempt to avoid reproducing patterns of data extraction from users that platforms perpetuate. Our participants do not just share their experience with us: rather, we work with them to propose interventions to think through interactions with data-driven platforms.

So far, we have carried out eight workshops with a total of 172 university students in the United Kingdom. This experimental session includes a trimmed down version of our original two-hour workshop format and provides space for AoIR delegates to reflect with us on the potential and value of this style of research and teaching.