Category: Software Studies

New book – Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity)

Platforms Everywhere: Understanding What Platforms Are and How to Study Them For years, much of public and academic debates about platforms revolved around social media. Today, attention has shifted toward artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructures, and AI platforms. Yet many of the underlying concerns remain the same: concentration of power, data extraction, infrastructure dependency, governance, and… Read more New book – Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity)

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Big AI: Cloud Infrastructure and the Industrialisation of AI

A new open access article by Fernando van der Vlist, Anne Helmond, and Fabian Ferrari in: Big Data & Society, https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517241232630. Big AI: Cloud Infrastructure and the Industrialisation of AI In this paper we study the convergence of AI and Big Tech (or ‘Big AI’), and AI’s ‘industrialization’, i.e. its transition from R&D to real-world… Read more Big AI: Cloud Infrastructure and the Industrialisation of AI

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From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation

A new open access article by Johannes Paßmann, Anne Helmond, and Robert Jansma in Internet Histories. We use data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to examine online commenting system Disqus’ shifting discourse about comment moderation and its increasing modes of platform interventionism. Crucially, we find that in the case of Disqus, the toxic is… Read more From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation

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Platform and app histories: Assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories

We just presented our forthcoming book chapter on ‘Platform and app histories: Assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories’ at the Engaging with Web Archives (#EWAvirtual) conference. Abstract In this chapter we discuss the research opportunities for historical studies of apps and platforms. Platforms and apps notoriously resist archiving due to their ephemerality… Read more Platform and app histories: Assessing source availability in web archives and app repositories

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Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities

We just published a new article (open access🔓) on doing historical platform studies: Anne Helmond and Fernando van der Vlist (2019) “Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities.” TMG – Journal for Media History 22(1): 6–34. http://www.tmgonline.nl/articles/434/ Abstract In this article, we propose a methodological outlook for historical platform studies to increase the prominence… Read more Social Media and Platform Historiography: Challenges and Opportunities

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Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations between Apps and Social Media

We just published a new article (open access?): Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, Fernando van der Vlist, and Esther Weltevrede (alphabetical). “Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations between Apps and Social Media.” Computational Culture 7 (2019). http://computationalculture.net/regramming-the-platform Abstract In this article, we empirically analyse the infrastructural relations between mobile apps and social media platforms and present a… Read more Regramming the Platform: Infrastructural Relations between Apps and Social Media

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