Editor and Founding Editor: Evelyn Ruppert
Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Evelyn is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She studies how digital technologies such as smart phones, social media platforms, as well as myriad government databases generate enormous volumes of data about the movements, preferences, associations, and activities of people. While providing new sources of knowledge about individuals and populations, she investigates how digital technologies and the data they generate can also powerfully shape and have consequences for who we are and how we are known and governed. As such, digital technologies are also changing how we understand ourselves as political subjects, that is, citizens with rights to speech, access, and privacy. How citizens make claims to digital rights through what they say and what they do through digital technologies are key questions that she addresses. Evelyn is Principal Investigator of a five-year European Research Council funded project, Peopling Europe: How data make a people (ARITHMUS; 2014-19). Recent books are Being Digital Citizens (2015; co-authored with Engin Isin) and Modes of Knowing (2016; co-edited with John Law).Managing Editor: Matthew Zook
Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US
Co-Editors
Jennifer Gabrys, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge, UK, UK
Jennifer is Principal Investigator on Citizen Sense, a project funded by the European Research Council that engages with inventive approaches to participation, monitoring and environmental data in order to test and query environmental sensing technology. Gabrys’s books include a techno-geographical investigation of environmental sensing, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and a material-political analysis of electronic waste, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, 2011). Her work can be found at citizensense.net and jennifergabrys.net.
Anatoliy Gruzd, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, CA
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Anatoliy is an Associate Professor in the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. He is also the Director of the Social Media Lab. Dr. Gruzd’s research initiatives explore how the advent of social media and the growing availability of social big data are changing the ways in which people communicate, collaborate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the social, economic and political norms and structures of modern society.
Agnieszka Leszczynski, Department of Geography, Western University, CanadaAgnieszka is a critical geographer and trained spatial data scientist whose scholarship integrates social and economic geographies, geographic information science, and science and technology studies. Her research engages the social, economic, and technological shifts associated with the commercialization of digital location (map-based apps, location-based services, sensors, and geocoded content), with current work looking at the value of location in the platform/sharing economy.
Dhiraj is a sociologist of new media. His research is primarily focused around social media in diverse contexts – journalism, health, ethnicity/race, and disasters. He has pioneered innovative methods in big data, including qualitative/mixed methods. He has also researched and published extensively on virtual organizations. Dr. Murthy has authored over 40 articles, book chapters, and papers and a book about Twitter, the first on the subject (published by Polity Press, 2013).
Sung-Yueh Perng, National Yang-Ming University, Taiwan
Sachil Singh, Surveillance Studies Centre and the Department of
Sachil is a sociologist whose main areas of study are medical sociology, critical race studies and surveillance. The common thread in his work is attention to the racial outcomes of digital sorting technologies, which has allowed him to research topics as varied as credit scoring in South Africa and healthcare in Canada. His current work examines the extent to which healthcare practitioners in Canada rely on pithy conclusions about race and ethnicity from medical apps to inform patient diagnosis and treatment.
Richard Rogers, Digital Methods Initiative, University of Amsterdam, NL
Richard is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.
Paolo Ciuccarelli,Northeastern University, College of Art Media and Design, Center for Design Founding Director
Rooted in the sciences of complexity, Paolo’s research and publishing activities focus on the development of data, information and knowledge experiences, tools and methods to support decision making and cognitive processes across multiple domains, from business and management to research and scholarship in the humanities. Formerly Scientific Director of DensityDesign - a research lab he founded at Politecnico di Milano – Design Department - he is now Director of the Northeastern University Center for Design, a hub aimed at fostering interdisciplinary design research.
Age is a human geographer and lecturer in environmental management. Her research focuses on the activity space and time use of individuals, the environmental aspects of mobility and consumption, and the environmental exposure people experience in their daily lives. She is conducting her postdoctoral studies in the Digital Geography Lab of the University of Helsinki while originally belonging to the Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu.
Julie (J.D.) Saperstein, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US
Julie is a geographer at the University of Kentucky whose work borrows from and syncretizes Science and Technology Studies, Digital Geographies, Surveillance Studies and Agro-food Studies. Her doctoral research is focused on the phenomenon of agricultural big data, seeking to understand the place of big data in the lives of farmers and the agro-food sector. Her goal is to explore agricultural big data as a surveillances system, and its implications for privacy, conceptions of Nature and the future of farming.
Andrew is an Addison Wheeler Research Fellow who researches the intersections between critical studies of cyber security, geography, and the role of ‘more-than-human’ computational agency. He recently completed his PhD – Malware Ecologies: A Politics of Cybersecurity – at the University in Oxford in 2019, orientated around an autoethnography of malware analysis and detection. After a year in computer science at the University of Bristol, he is now on a 3-year research fellowship on ‘Digital Decisions’, exploring the role of machine learning and its impact upon the practices of cyber security. 
Rohith is a teaching fellow at the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University, Delhi NCR. He has recently submitted his PhD at the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. In addition, he is a consultant researcher at the Civic Media Observatory, Global Voices. His research areas are at the intersection of media, political economy, and labour and development studies in South Asia. Previously, he worked in public policy organisations in management, research and founder-trustee roles for around 8 years.
Gemma Newlands, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, NL and Department of Communication and Culture, BI Norwegian Business School, NO
Natalia is a digital anthropologist based at the School of Anthropology of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Her research interests include social media, digital health, technoethics and methods, particularly mixed and digital approaches. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked at the University of Chile as a qualitative methodologies teacher and at the Pontifical Catholic University as a senior data analyst. Her doctoral research is going to be focused on communities in which data is the centre of gravity, such as research institutions, data science programs, and online groups where knowledge about data processing and data itself flow from analysis software to social media and back.
Joshua Uyheng, Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Judith Simon, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, DE
Judith investigates epistemological and ethical issues arising in the design, development and use of technologies of information, computation and communication. Her approach is inspired by social epistemology, STS, values in design, computer ethics as well as feminist theory. Beyond being interested in the relationship between data epistemologies, data ontologies and data politics, she is working on (epistemic) trust, reputation, and epistemic responsibilities of different human and non-human agents in entangled socio-technical systems.
Co-Editors - Demos
Richard is a Web epistemologist, an area of study where the main claim is that the Web is a knowledge culture distinct from other media. Rogers concentrates on the research opportunities that would have been improbable or impossible without the Internet. His research involves studying and building info-tools. He studies and makes use of the adjudicative or 'recommender' cultures of the Web that help to determine the reputation of information as well as organizations. The most well-known tool Rogers has developed with his colleagues is the Issue Crawler, a server-side Web crawler, co-link machine and graph visualizer.
Paolo Ciuccarelli,Northeastern University, College of Art Media and Design, Center for Design Founding Director
Rooted in the sciences of complexity, Paolo’s research and publishing activities focus on the development of data, information and knowledge experiences, tools and methods to support decision making and cognitive processes across multiple domains, from business and management to research and scholarship in the humanities. Formerly Scientific Director of DensityDesign - a research lab he founded at Politecnico di Milano – Design Department - he is now Director of the Northeastern University Center for Design, a hub aimed at fostering interdisciplinary design research.Editorial Assistant
Age Poom, Department of Geography, University of Tartu, EE; Department of Geosciences and Geography, University of Helsinki, FI
Age is a human geographer and lecturer in environmental management. Her research focuses on the activity space and time use of individuals, the environmental aspects of mobility and consumption, and the environmental exposure people experience in their daily lives. She is conducting her postdoctoral studies in the Digital Geography Lab of the University of Helsinki while originally belonging to the Mobility Lab of the University of Tartu.
Assistant Editors
Margie Cheesman, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK
Margie Cheesman is a digital anthropologist based at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her doctoral research examines the use of blockchain technologies in humanitarianism, and involves fieldwork in Jordan’s refugee camps. Margie’s research interests include digital identity, inequality and rights. She has worked for the civil liberties initiative, Open Migration, and the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-cultural Change (CReSC). She has conducted research with international organisations such as the InfoMigrants, GSMA Mobile for Development, and UN agencies. Margie's editorial work includes Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects and Rights (Routledge, 2019) and Data Practices (forthcoming).
Julie (J.D.) Saperstein, Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, US
Julie is a geographer at the University of Kentucky whose work borrows from and syncretizes Science and Technology Studies, Digital Geographies, Surveillance Studies and Agro-food Studies. Her doctoral research is focused on the phenomenon of agricultural big data, seeking to understand the place of big data in the lives of farmers and the agro-food sector. Her goal is to explore agricultural big data as a surveillances system, and its implications for privacy, conceptions of Nature and the future of farming.
Andrew Dwyer, Department of Geography, University of Durham, UK
Rohith Jyothish, Department of Political Science, Ashoka University, IN
Gemma is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam and a Doctoral Stipendiary Fellow at the Nordic Centre for Internet and Society, BI Norwegian Business School. As a sociologist of organisations, her research lies at the intersection of AI and work, where she is currently researching the working conditions of Scandinavian gig-workers and the chatbot-trainers. From a social sustainability perspective, Gemma is also exploring dataset provenance and the global production chains of AI services.
Natalia Orrego, School of Anthropology, Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, CL
Yu-Shan Tseng, Centre of Consumer Society Research, Institute of Urban and Regional Studies, University of Helsinki, FI
Yu-Shan Tseng is a digital/urban geographer based in the Centre of Consumer Society Research and Institute of Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Helsinki. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Durham. Her research explores various effects of algorithmic decision-making/platforms on everyday practices, participatory democracy and urban policy-making. Her postdoctoral research examines 1) the emotional and affective dimensions of immigrant-couriers working for food delivery platforms (Foodora and Wolt); and 2) the effects of participatory platforms (Omastadi/Decidim) on immigrants’ access and right to democratic participation and urban policy-making in Helsinki.
Joshua is a political psychologist pursuing a PhD in societal computing at Carnegie Mellon University. His research examines digital disinformation and online hate speech in the Global South through interdisciplinary work combining machine learning, network science, and critical discourse analysis. He is also interested in decolonial approaches to computational social science about and within unequal democracies. He hails from the Philippines.
Advisory Board Founding Co-Editors
Adrian Mackenzie, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
Adrian is interested in the lives of data, especially in databases but also in data analysis, machine learning and other forms of 'analytics.' At the moment, he is focusing on data as a way of thinking about 'BioIT convergences' across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and research databases and visualization technologies. He is looking at changes in the work, productivity and situation of life scientists, and on the transformations in technique, knowledge and products associated with bio-IT related developments. The wider stakes here include the nature of promise, design, value, speculation, subjectivity and imagination in knowledge economies.
Irina Shklovski, Digital Media Communication Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen, DK
Irina is social scientist whose work is located at the intersection of Information Sciences, Communication Studies and Human Computer Interaction. Her studies of social network structures and in-situ relational practices expose how local context can shape technology adoption and use, and how global networked information flows can, in turn, become part of the local context. She examines how people adapt and integrate an increasingly broad array of information and communication technologies into their daily lives and under conditions of strain. Her recent collaborations with data scientists in industry and academia explore how we can enrich our quantitative structural analysis of large social network datasets through the addition of qualitative methods.
Adrian is interested in the lives of data, especially in databases but also in data analysis, machine learning and other forms of 'analytics.' At the moment, he is focusing on data as a way of thinking about 'BioIT convergences' across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and research databases and visualization technologies. He is looking at changes in the work, productivity and situation of life scientists, and on the transformations in technique, knowledge and products associated with bio-IT related developments. The wider stakes here include the nature of promise, design, value, speculation, subjectivity and imagination in knowledge economies.Irina Shklovski, Digital Media Communication Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen, DK
Irina is social scientist whose work is located at the intersection of Information Sciences, Communication Studies and Human Computer Interaction. Her studies of social network structures and in-situ relational practices expose how local context can shape technology adoption and use, and how global networked information flows can, in turn, become part of the local context. She examines how people adapt and integrate an increasingly broad array of information and communication technologies into their daily lives and under conditions of strain. Her recent collaborations with data scientists in industry and academia explore how we can enrich our quantitative structural analysis of large social network datasets through the addition of qualitative methods.
Judith Simon, Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, DE
Judith investigates epistemological and ethical issues arising in the design, development and use of technologies of information, computation and communication. Her approach is inspired by social epistemology, STS, values in design, computer ethics as well as feminist theory. Beyond being interested in the relationship between data epistemologies, data ontologies and data politics, she is working on (epistemic) trust, reputation, and epistemic responsibilities of different human and non-human agents in entangled socio-technical systems.
