Organizers: Robyn Caplan (Duke University) and João C. Magalhães (University of Groningen).
Participants: Meredith Clark (Northeastern University), Laura Manley (Harvard University), Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia), Christian Katzenbach, Dennis Redeker, and Daria Dergacheva (University of Bremen).
Duration: Full-day workshop.
We are at a critical juncture for the future study of platforms and other Internet infrastructure. Researchers who study platforms have always had difficulties navigating access. As noted by Bonini and Gandini (2020), it is not just the proprietary algorithms owed by technology that are “black boxed,” but rather the industry itself. While there was a brief period between 2016 and 2018 where technology companies appeared to open themselves up for external researchers to conduct ethnographic work or interviews, access to these companies remains rare and is increasingly limited. Quantitative data are also becoming scarcer, as major platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Reddit have made their platforms more difficult to study, severely limiting free-API access for researchers (Gilbert and Geurkink, 2024), or eliminating free access altogether (Gotfredsen, 2023).
In this context, the need for building and maintaining alternative archives about platforms becomes urgent. Indeed, a number of scholars have been dealing with these problems by creating their own archives, circumventing platforms and asking people to do things like donate their own data, such as Meredith Clark’s Archiving Black Twitter project (https://www.archivingtheblackweb.org/); keeping track of public statements, such as Michael Zimmer and team’s Zuckerberg Files (https://zuckerbergfiles.org/); and collecting, curating, and giving access to sets of platform public documents such as the Platform Governance Archive (https://www.platformgovernancearchive.org/). For historians, meanwhile, questions of archives and access to documents have always been central. But these questions take on new meaning with born digital sources.
We are proposing a full-day workshop on alternative archives for platform governance research. Workshop participants’ include creatives of alternative archives, such as Meredith Clark (Northeastern University, Black Twitter Project), Laura Manley (Harvard University, Facebook Files), and Christian Katzenbach, Dennis Redeker, and Daria Dergacheva (University of Bremen, Platform Governance Archive). We will be joined by media historian Heidi Tworek (University of British Columbia) to guide us in thinking about what we need to be collecting now to study platforms ten, twenty-five, or fifty years from now.
The workshop will be split into two sessions of three hours each. In the first session, participants will explain their initiatives, unpacking the methods they developed to both create their archives and circumvent (or not) the roadblocks they faced while doing so. Then, participants will discuss two main topics. Firstly, the politics of archiving, that is, how decisions around archiving and enabling access intersect with gender, race, and class, and with researchers’ own positionality. Secondly, the impact of alternative archives. In reflecting on who has used or not their archives and for what, participants will be invited to consider the concrete steps needed to make their work useful for multiple audiences. Throughout the workshop, we will ask participants to imagine the new types of archives we could create using the data they are collecting for their own research, including policy documents taken over time, screenshots from platforms of various points (i.e. version histories), oral histories, public statements, and other media coverage.
We hope the workshop can not only educate scholars (particularly young scholars) about the types of alternative archives already available, but that these scholars can be trained in how to create and share data as they progress through their work. The goal of this day is field-building, and identifying a common need to share resources to foster the development of platform governance research in the future. We invite scholars at every level who do work on existing platforms, as well as “dead and dying” platforms that are being lost to Internet history as they “fail, decline, or expire” (McCammon & Lingel, 2022).
This workshop builds on an event organized in June 2023 by the “Data & Society Institute” on “Access, Archives, and Workarounds”. This new version of the workshop is being hosted by the Platform Governance Research Network (PlatGovNet).
References
Bonini, T., & Gandini, A. (2020). The Field as a Black Box: Ethnographic Research in the Age of Platforms. Social Media + Society, 6(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120984477
Clark, M. (n.d.). Archiving Black Twitter. https://www.meredithdclark.com/archivingblacktwitter
Gilbert, S. & Geurkink, B. (2024). Why Reddit’s decision to cut off researchers is bad for its business—and humanity. Fastcompany. https://www.fastcompany.com/91014116/reddit-researchers-bad-for-business
Gotfredsen, S. G. (2023). Q&A: What happened to academic research on Twitter? Columbia Journalism Review. https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/qa-what-happened-to-academic-research-on-twitter.php
McCammon, M., & Lingel, J. (2022) Situating dead-and-dying platforms: technological failure, infrastructural precarity, and digital decline, Internet Histories 6(1-2). 10.1080/24701475.2022.2071395