Anne Helmond is Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. She is co-director (with Prof. José van Dijck) of the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society.’ Here, her research focuses on the processes of platformization, algorithmization, and datafication from an empirical and historical perspective. Her work emphasizes the material and programmable (data) infrastructures that underpin these processes.
Her research primarily focuses on developing methods for empirically and historically examining the process of platformization, the politics of platforms, platform governance, and the operationalization of platform power. In addition, she is actively working on the development of digital methods to investigate how apps and app stores mediate sociocultural issues and practices, as well as to explore the political economy of mobile data flows.
She is also a member of the international research collectives Digital Methods Initiative (2007–) and App Studies Initiative (2017–) developing methods for examining the history and (data) infrastructure of social media platforms and apps. Her research interests include digital methods, software studies, platform studies, platformization, app studies, critical data studies, and web history.
In her dissertation on ‘The web as platform: Data flows in social media‘ (2015), Anne developed the notion of “platformization” to conceptualise 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”.
Anne’s work has been published in highly-ranked 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.
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.