Data Publics Top Reads

Christmas is approaching and what could be than enjoying some great academic reads on the ongoing datafication of journalism and publics while sitting in the couch next to the Christmas tree. The Data Public project began almost a year ago in January 2020 and over the last year, the researchers in the project have immersed ourselves into the growing literature on publics, datafication, algorithms and journalism. Here we have chosen some of our top reads on the topic, which hopefully can inspire fellow researchers, students or interested parties within the industry, who are trying themselves to grasp how datafication is transforming journalism and audiences.

• The Platform Society: Public Values in a Connective World, by José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal (2018)
  This recent book by José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal offers a comprehensive analysis and overview of the ways online platforms are increasingly shaping our daily lives in Western societies. The third chapter specifically zooms in on how data-driven publishers, such as BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post and the Big Five platforms have transformed the news sector’s economic, technical, and social foundations. This is an introductory read to the field to understand more on a societal level what is changing the current media eco-system and offers a great conceptual language for researchers endeavouring into this field.
   
• The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, by Andrew Chadwick (2013)
  Andrew Chadwick’s book on the hybrid media system does not specifically deal with datafication, but rather with the ongoing transformations of the media system, which is inherently hybrid. Throughout the book, Andrew Chadwick illustrates how the media system always contains parts of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media logics that guide how events become news. This is a great read because the understanding of hybridity becomes helpful in understanding datafication, which is not an easily graspable object, but rather part of many different logics (e.g. editorial and market logics) and is lodged in hybrids processes, where users move in and out of different contexts.
   
• Informerte borgere? Hallvard Moe, Jan Fredrik Hovden, Brita Ytre-Arne, Tine Figenschou, Torgeir Uberg Nærland, Hilde Sakariassen and Kjersti Thorbjørnsrud (2019)
  This book takes up the question of the informed citizens and their public connection, starting at the point of the media consumption as it actually takes place today in Norway. By combining the theory on public connection and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital they make interesting conclusion in how we must understand public connection more widely, but also how socio economic and cultural factors does affects citizens way of orienting themselves in society. This is a great read as it highlights the differing ways of connecting, but with a sensitivity towards how stratification in the media consumption might matter.
   
• Facets of the Public Sphere: Dewey, Arendt, Habermas, by Craig Calhoun (2017)
  Publics and the public sphere often figure in accounts of the potentials or possible negative effects of datafication, such as in the accounts of for example filter bubbles and echo chambers. This book chapter by Craig Calhoun offers a great introduction to three of the major contributors to the concept of publics, namely John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt. It is, therefore, a great read for anyone who wants to dive into the literature on publics and understand where a lot of the newer conceptions have their origin.
   
• Newer conceptualisations of publics; danah boyd (2010), Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess (2015) and Tarleton Gillespie (2014)
  Within the last decade, several scholars have begun to conceptualise the new forms of publics that arise online. Some of the new interesting concepts are danah boyd’s ‘Networked Publics’, Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess’s ‘Ad Hoc Publics’ and Tarleton Gillespie’s ‘Calculated Publics'. These all offer great reads for anyone interested in how data is part of the public formation today as these different concepts begin to grasp how for example the specific affordances of digital platforms become part of how publics form.
   
• Quantified audiences and the transformation of journalism, Chris Anderson (2011), Edson Tandoc (2014) and Angelé Christin (2018)
  As audiences increasingly began to enter the newsrooms in the quantified form of clicks, researchers have explored how this is transforming the journalistic practices. One of the great reads on this topic is Chris Anderson’s ethnographic study of a US newsroom where he explores the editorial rationalisations of the increasing use of audience metrics. Equally, Edson Tandoc’s study of three newsrooms offers specific insights into how the practice of gatekeeping is changing with audience metrics. A more recent study is the one by Angelé Christin in which she offers an ethnographic view into two newsrooms, one in France and one in the United States, where she documents the differences in the uses and meanings assigned to audience metrics by editors and journalists and how these are linked to the trajectories of the journalistic field in the two countries. For anyone interested in how data is transforming news practices, these offer a great place to start.
   
• Algorithms and the news, Taina Bucher (2017) and Baláz Bodó (2019)
  Recent studies have begun to also specifically look at the use of algorithms in newsrooms. Here a good read is Taina Bucher’s investigation of how journalists and editors actually talk about algorithms in different Nordic newsrooms and how it is pushing the boundaries of what they understand as good journalism. Baláz Bodó offers a different take on it as he in his study he traces the considerations of different European newsroom who have or are in the process of implementing personalisation algorithms. Arguing the ways algorithms are used by news media is distinctly different than that of the large commercial platforms. These two studies both offer very interesting insights into how editors and journalists talk and work with the algorithms that inevitably are moving more and more into the newsrooms.