Anne Helmond is Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. She directs the IOS community Shaping Digital Societies (formerly Governing the Digital Society), which brings together research on datafication, algorithmisation, platformisation, and their consequences for society.
Her research examines the politics and materialities of platforms and digital infrastructures. She is particularly interested in how platforms expand, how they build infrastructural and economic dependencies, and how platform power is organised and governed.
A central concept in her work is platformization (Helmond, 2015; Helmond, 2026): the expansion of platforms across the web, mobile ecosystems, industries, and, increasingly, AI technologies and infrastructures. Her research traces the programmable data infrastructures, technical relations, business arrangements, and governance mechanisms through which this expansion takes place.
Together with Fernando van der Vlist, she is the author of Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity, 2026). The book develops an approach to studying platforms through three complementary lenses: as services, companies, and technologies and infrastructures. Her current work extends this perspective to the platformisation of AI, cloud infrastructure dependencies, platform ecosystems, and changing forms of platform power.
Her research also develops digital methods for studying platforms historically and empirically. This includes methods for researching apps and app stores, APIs, platform ecosystems and partnerships, mobile data flows, and the changing infrastructures of the web.
Anne is a long-standing member of the Digital Methods Initiative (2007–) and co-founded the App Studies Initiative (2017–), where she works on methodological approaches to the study of mobile apps and their infrastructures. Her research draws on 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 the article “The Platformization of the Web” (2015), she introduced the concept of platformization to describe the rise of the platform as a dominant infrastructural and economic model of the web and its expansion into other websites, apps, and industries. Her dissertation received an honourable mention in the Association of Internet Researchers 2016 Best Dissertation Award. Her subsequent research has examined the platformisation of mobile ecosystems, APIs and platform governance, business and data partnerships, super-apps, cloud and AI infrastructures, and the longer history of the datafied web.
Her work has appeared in 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 PhD research on automation practices, platform governance, and AI in education.
From 2021 to 2024, she was co-PI, with Johannes Paßmann, of the project A Historical Technography of Online Commenting within the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre SFB 1472 Transformations of the Popular at the University of Siegen. The project examined the historical development of online commenting systems and practices.
From 2017 to 2021, she held an NWO Veni grant for the project App Ecosystems: A Critical History of Apps. The project developed digital methods for writing app histories across three interconnected levels: individual apps, app stores, and platforms.
In Spring 2019, she was Visiting Comenius Professor at the University of Siegen, where she worked on digital methods and web history. Before joining Utrecht University in 2022, she was Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.