Anne Helmond is Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. Together with with Prof. José van Dijck, she co-directs the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society,’ which investigates platformization, algorithmization, and datafication—their societal impact and the governance of digital technologies. Her research places particular emphasis on platformization: the expansion of platforms across the web, the mobile ecosystem, AI technologies, and various societal domains. She examines the material and programmable data infrastructures that underpin and shape this process of platform expansion.
Her broader research focuses on developing methods for empirically and historically studying platformization, the politics and governance of platforms, how platform power is operationalized in practice, and the rise of AI as a platformized infrastructure. She also contributes to the advancement of digital methods to investigate how apps and app stores mediate sociocultural practices and issues, and explores the political economy of mobile data flows.
She is a long-standing member of two major international research collectives: the Digital Methods Initiative (2007–) and the App Studies Initiative (2017–), where she works on developing methodological approaches to the study of the historical and infrastructural dimensions of social media platforms and mobile applications. Her research interests span digital methods, software studies, platform studies, app studies, critical data studies, and web history.
In her dissertation ‘The web as platform: Data flows in social media‘ (2015) and her influential article ‘The Platformization of the Web‘ (2015), Anne introduced the concept of “platformization” to conceptualize the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the web and its expansion and integration into other websites, apps, and industries. Her dissertation received an honorable mention in the AoIR 2016 Best Dissertation Award for standing “to make a significant long-term impact in the field”.
Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Histories, First Monday, and Computational Culture.
She currently supervises several PhD projects on the evolution of automation practices, platform governance, and the role of AI in education.
From 2021–2022 she was Principal Investigator of the project “Historische Technografie des Online-Kommentars” and is now (2022–) an associated researcher examining the history of online commenting systems and practices within the DFG funded SFB 1472 “Transformationen des Populären” at the University of Siegen, Germany.
From 2017–2020 she held a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project ‘App ecosystems: A critical history of apps’ (2017–2020). In this project she developed novel digital methods for writing app histories on three interrelated levels – individual apps, app stores, and platforms – to understand the emergence of this new cultural form.
In Spring 2019, she was Comenius Professor of Digital Methods and Web History at the University of Siegen, Germany.
From 2015–2022, she was Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.