Studying Media as an Ongoing Accomplishment

We are excited to invite you to this summer’s Lecture Series on “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI”. Inspired by Simon Garfinkel’s notion of “ongoing accomplishment”, we invited eight guest speakers to explore research methods and situations methodologically.

→ Register here

About the lecture series

The lecture series “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI” addresses methodological problems that emerge from studying media as an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel). The central premise is that methods cannot be treated as external instruments applied to pre-given objects. Rather, research situations are constituted through the entanglement of media and tools, technical and human sensing, and research practices. Methodological reflection thus focuses on the conditions under which knowledge is cooperatively produced and problematised.

A key challenge is the multiple situatedness of digital and sensor-based media. Practices are locally embedded yet generate and connect multiple situations through infrastructural distribution, real-time synchronization, and scalability. Micro-situations must therefore be analyzed in relation to infrastructures of sensing and sense-making, data publics and stakeholder constellations, and the interplay of human perception with technical sensor systems. This requires methodological designs that combine approaches capable of tracing cross-scale relations and controversies.

Furthermore, the lecture series is concerned with the methodological status of digital tools and AI systems within research practice. Tools for collecting, sharing, analysing, and visualising data inscribe their own ordering capacities into research. With sensor data and AI outputs, these effects intensify: classifications, recommendations, and model biases shape what can be observed, archived, and interpreted. The series situates these dynamics within debates on performativity, inscriptions, bias, and interface methods, while emphasizing that they emerge in entangled sensory research practices involving human and non-human agencies.

Finally, the lecture series inquires into how methodological choices distribute attention and agency: they determine which experiences count as data, which forms of sensing become legible, and which publics are addressed and which are excluded. Accordingly, the series approaches methods as political arrangements that govern participation in knowledge-making – asking whose voices enter datasets and models, whose interpretations shape analytic pipelines, and whose concerns remain unaccounted for. Cooperative methodology may require making conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidentiary standards explicit, accountable, and revisable.

Lectures & Speakers

We invited eight international guest speakers from media studies, social science, economics, informatics, linguistics, science and technology studies as well as art and activism. They come from the Netherlands, Finland, Iran, USA, Germany and Great Britain. 

Event Details

• Dates: April 15 – July 8, 2026
• Location: University of Siegen, Herrengarten 3, Room: AH-A 217/18
• Streaming: via Webex
• Time: Wednesdays, 2:15 AM – 3:45 PM CET

How to Register

All events take place in hybrid form (on-site and via Webex). No registration is required if you would like to attend on-site. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here →

Contact

info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

The Spring School MEDIA EXTRACTIVISM explores, at the intersection of media and cultural studies and activism, how “raw materials” are extracted, used, constructed, imagined, and discursively negotiated. In doing so, it reflects on the complex interweaving of materiality, media representation, imagination, and the societal attribution of meaning.

• What images, narratives, and frames shape public perceptions of raw materials, energy sources, or sustainable alternatives?
• How do journalistic, social, and artistic formats portray the fragility and urgency of resources, as well as their creative power of healing and care?
• Which extractive regimes do algorithmic and cloud-based systems generate or perpetuate?
• How do we narrate the water, land use, and energy conflicts associated with AI and cloud computing?
• Where can we mobilize and practice resistance against extractive violence in our everyday lives?

The Spring School invites scholars, activists, and journalists to explore theoretical and empirical approaches to resources as phenomena of media culture. Within the framework of the Spring School, we aim not only to analyze discourses and representations but also to conceive new performative and participatory communication formats. The goal is to connect scholarly perspectives with climate policy action, thereby providing new impetus for a critical analysis of media-driven extraction that critically expands the public understanding of sustainability and, in light of the urgency to act, finds ways to address the climate catastrophe.

We look forward to lectures and workshops with Migration Audio Archive, Jakob Claus, Gerko Egert, Azadeh Ganjeh, Matthias Grotkopp, Mariette Kesting, Frederike Lange, Petra Löffler, Julia Nitschke, Maike Reinerth, Rémi Willemin, and others.

Studierende, Lehrende und ihre Seminargruppen sind – etwa im Rahmen von Exkursionen – herzlich willkommen, an unserer Media Climate Justice Spring School no. 3 in Bochum teilzunehmen. Infos und Anmeldung unter: mail@mediaclimatejustice.org

by Tahereh Aboofazeli & Arjang Omrani

The Affect of a Torn Carpet

A 12-meter handwoven carpet, relatively intact, torn into pieces and hung on the exhibition wall.

At first glance, it provokes feelings of pity and protest. Many visitors repeatedly confront us with the question: “Why did you tear the carpet apart?”

We responded with a question in return: “Why are you moved by its tearing?”

In mourning the loss of a handcrafted object and the hard labor of a weaver, the question arises: Whose labor has been lost? Which weaver?

Before the carpet was torn, what presence or share did that unknown weaver have in the moments of delight and admiration for its beauty-

in its buying and selling,

in its being touched, experienced, and cared for?

For most of our audience, this was the first reflective encounter with the anonymity of the weaver, revealing the depth of her distance from the system of production, commerce, and aesthetics that surrounds the carpet.

The stories of anonymous weavers – speaking of their hatred for the carpet, scattered among the torn pieces, imbue the visual pleasure drawn from the colorful, patterned world of the carpet market with a sense of shame.

It was the first encounter with the dissensus we seek to bring to the scene and share with the public: the space between the reality that exists within the current regime of carpet production and trade, and the reality we believe ought to exist.

Confronting culture and power

Drawing on the conceptual framework of shared anthropology, our project positions itself at the intersection of critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy. These fields share a commitment to critically conscious, engaged, and animating practices that intervene in the public domain, confronting the contested role of culture in the production, distribution, and regulation of power. Within this framework, knowledge is conceived as co-authored—not produced by the anthropologist alone, but generated through processes of “sharing-the-anthropology.”

This approach treats multimodal narratives and artistic forms not as mere “objects” or “outputs” of research but as modes of inquiry—as ways of practicing knowledge, mediating it, and circulating it beyond academic enclaves. Such circulation is not only vital for making scholarly insights publicly accessible and open to critique; it is also crucial for connecting collaborators within the project—here, the weavers—to the networks of knowledge and power that typically exclude them. In this sense, the anthropologist’s role becomes one of mediating and curating these encounters, working to narrow structural distances rather than to reproduce them.

The Weaving Memories project, defined from the outset as an intervention in the handmade carpet production regime, thus seeks not only to render visible the conditions of labor but to unsettle its epistemic hierarchies: to create alternative spaces where weavers’ knowledge, narratives, and aesthetic decisions can reconfigure the terms through which carpets—and their makers—are understood.

Emergence of a New Literacy

The audience’s encounter, however, is not limited to confronting the anonymity and invisibility of the weaver. In Weaving Memories, we intervened in the relationship between the weaver and the carpet by asking: What would happen if, instead of pre-designed, commissioned patterns, one were to weave one’s own narratives and ideas? The exhibition staged the public’s encounter with precisely this intervention: What if that anonymous weaver had woven her own carpet?

After spending nearly an hour in the exhibition in Siegen and looking closely at the carpets, one visitor remarked: “I feel that engaging with these carpets—and with what they bring forth—requires a new kind of literacy, one that I must first learn by immersing myself among them and then slowly acquire in order to relate to them.”

In our view, the audience’s presence in the exhibition is not merely an encounter with the weaver and her narrative, but an encounter with a mode of narrating and an aesthetic form through which she has chosen to intertwine her knowledge of life and of weaving. It is an encounter with a new literacy and discourse introduced by the weaver herself.

About the exhibition

The exhibition “WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story” took place from October 6 to 31, 2025, at the poool art space in Siegen. The exhibition was curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.

Five artist weavers from the North Khorasan region of Iran participated in the exhibition, showcasing eight life-size carpets and sharing their deeply personal stories. The presented carpets invited visitors to reflect on the hidden stories and cultural connections that have shaped the production and meaning of carpets. The exhibition also encouraged visitors to engage with the trajectory of marginalisation and exploitation of those who weave, shedding light on the colonial and capitalist entanglements of exploitation that continue to have an impact today.

The presented carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University). Ten artist weavers from this region have participated in the „Weaving Memories“ project. Among those, the five artist weavers that have taken part in the installation in Siegen were Masoumeh Zolfaghari, Asieh Davari, Saheb Jamal Rahimi, Taqan Beik Barzin and Zohreh Parvin, with Zoleikha Davari providing additional support with stabilizing weaving work.

Challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI

This series explores the challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI. AI is not only a subject of media studies, but deployed to collect data, interpret texts, perform mult-modal analysis, and assist writing. But what happens when prompts, models, and training data enter the methodological core of media studies? On what grounds can we cooperate with AI in research? The seminar series Synthetic Methods takes these questions as its point of departure. It explores current practices, tools, approaches and issues of synthetic methods, asking how AI participates in producing, mediating, and interpreting knowledge.

In recent years, the tools and infrastructures of generative AI—large language models, multimodal systems, and computer-vision pipelines—have begun to blur the boundaries between data collection, analysis, and interpretation. AI does not simply assist researchers in automating tasks; it brings in its own epistemic logics, biases, and inscriptions. Text and image generation models suggest categories, segment data, or simulate field interactions. They act as synthetic interlocutors in ethnographic work, as co-coders in qualitative analysis, or as analytical lenses in cultural analytics. The series engages with these developments hands-on and conceptually, examining what it means to “do research with AI.”

At the centre of the series lies an interest in the distributed accomplishment of discovery between humans and AI. Instead of handing analytical capacity entirely to computational systems, we will explore how reasoning, interpretation, and sense-making can emerge collaboratively across human and AI agencies. Generative models may extend perception and imagination, but they also depend on human intervention, interpretation, and evaluative judgment. The sessions thus foreground research as a shared practice of translation and negotiation, where human reflexivity and AI inference together shape what counts as evidence, relevance, and insight. This distributed perspective opens the space to examine the affordances, issues, and evaluative criteria that govern scholarship when AI becomes part of the epistemic process: How can we maintain reflexive, critical and ethical orientations while experimenting with new, mixed agencies of knowing?

Over the course of the semester, the series will address a range of perspectives and practices. An initial session on infrastructures and AI ethics situates large-scale models within the political economies of cloud computing, highlighting questions of privacy, transparency, and data provenance. Subsequent meetings explore how AI reshapes established methodological domains: as an assistant in qualitative analysis and ethnography, as a writing companion and reflective mirror in academic text production, and as a tool for analyzing visual and multimodal materials. Participants will experiment with both commercial and locally hosted models, comparing their capacities and constraints.

Specific attention will be given to the question if and how synthetic methods require specific modes and practices of methodological reflexivity. The series does not treat models as neutral instruments but as infrastructures with their own histories, biases, and aesthetics. Engaging with generative systems thus becomes an exercise in distributed reflexivity: models, prompts, and humans co-produce insight. This distributed agency raises fundamental questions of authorship, responsibility, and transparency that reach beyond technical documentation. To “work synthetically” is to navigate this entanglement without surrendering critical distance—to cultivate a mode of inquiry that remains aware of its own mediations.

Schedule
22.10. Infrastructure and synthetic reasoning – Understanding beyond AI with Hinau Firdaus and Amita Kapoor

05.11. AI for Ethnographic Analysis

19.11. Writing with AI with Sergei Pashakhin

3.12. System Prompts with Marcus Burkhardt & Hendrik Bender

17.12. Voice of Machine Theft with Rosa Menkman und David Gauthier

14.01. Metabolic Images and Method Maps with Elena Pilipets

Location

All lectures take place on-site in Siegen with a hybrid setting. You can register to get the Webex-link and join sessions online.

University Siegen
room: AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

Registration

Please register via email to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Organisation

The series is organized by INF project “Infrastructures for Collaborative Sensory RDM Practices” in collaboration with Carolin Gerlitz, Elena Pilipets, Dominik Schrey, Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt, Sergei Pashakhin & Hina Firdaus.

edited by Natasha Klimenko (Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin), Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina Foundation & CRC 1187) and Viktoriya Sereda (VUIAS Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)

The anthology “Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine”, published by transcript as an open-access book, explores how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russo-Ukrainian War.

→ To the E-Book

About the book

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has destroyed lives, communities, and cities. From the start, images of this war spread across various media platforms. Paintings, photographs, drone footage, TikToks, and Instagram posts shaped how the war is experienced, represented, and archived. In this multidisciplinary volume, artists, scholars, and writers explore how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The publication has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Düsseldorf.

About the book launch

10 November 2025 | 6pm | Pilecki-Institute Berlin, Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin

Panelists: Natasha Klimenko, Miglė Bareikytė, Viktoriya Sereda; Moderation: Eva Yakubovska

The book launch will feature a presentation of the volume, including an essay film based on selected contributions from the book, highlighting the intersections of art, media, and war, and a panel discussion about the role of art during wartime and in commemoration. 

For participation please register via prisma[æt]trafo-berlin.de.

Outreach Event in Bochum

The project “Bicycle Media: Cooperative Media of Mobility” presents the film Ovarian Psycos, a documentary by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, on October 16.

Important Info

OVARIAN PSYCOS
Documentary by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle (USA 2016) | 72 min. | Original version | Free admission
Date: 16.10.2025 | Doors open: 6:30 PM | Start: 7:00 PM
Location: Kino Endstation
Wallbaumweg 108
44894 Bochum

About Ovarian Psycos

Riding at night through the streets of Eastside Los Angeles is considered dangerous. But the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade, a misfit crew of feminist women of colour, use their bikes to confront the violence in their lives. In their first joint full-length film, Sokolowski und Trumbull- LaValle portray three of the crew protagonists: Xela de la X, founder of the group, single mother and rapper, street artist Andi, who aspires to become a leader in the crew, and bright-eyed recruit Evie.

»Our initial concept of the film was an all-out-super-heroine story. A story where confident, unwavering young women – the Ovas – take back the streets en masse, on bikes, shouting in the face of convention. But once we started production the film took a turn. The real super- heroine work was happening behind the scenes, in daily life, within their personal relationships as mothers, daughters, and sisters. We met working-class young women who were strong but vulnerable. Feminism isn’t something the Ovas choose, but it has been inherited. Inherited from living in a community politicised by the civil rights movement, and by the realities and challenges of growing up within the context of colonisation, immigration, racism, misogyny and gendered violence. These were women dramatising power and freedom on their bikes, at night, publicly in the streets, and at the same time struggling to hold onto that same power as single mothers, aspiring artists, students and working women.«

– Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle.

This event is organized in cooperation with the Bochumer Cycling Club Windkante, Ruhr University Bochum (Chair of Gender Media Studies) and the SFB Media of Cooperation.

Carpets as a medium of storytelling 

by Tahereh Aboofazeli and Arjang Omrani

SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” hosts the exhibition WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story, which will be open from October 6 to 31, 2025, at Poool Kunstraum in Siegen. Five art weavers from the North Khorasan region of Iran participate in the exhibition, showcasing eight life-size carpets and sharing their deeply personal stories.

The exhibition is curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG funded Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.

Research on AI, Big Data Processing & Synthetic Media

The CRC “Media of Cooperation” launches its Critical Data School initiative at the University of Siegen with the international Autumn School “Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI”.

→ Autumn School Programme 

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

About the Autumn School

The five-day event at the University of Siegen explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

Event Highlights 

The five-day event features three keynotes and opens with a conference that brings together a total of six panels with contributions by scholars from Hong Kong, Norway, Australia, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, and the UK. 

Our keynotes

• “Synthetic Narration: Do AI-generated stories flatten cultural diversity?” by Jill Walker Rettberg (Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen) 
• “Synthetic situations: Ethnographic strategies for post-artificial worlds” by Gabriele de Seta (Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen) 
• “Design Research with visual generative AI: failures, challenges, and research pathways” by Ángeles Briones (DensityDesign Lab, Politecnico di Milano)

From the second day onwards, the Autumn School moves into hands-on workshops and project work facilitated by a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers. 

Mix questions! Monday, 8 September 

Day one opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. The panels explore diverse topics, from identities and digital narratives to platforms, infrastructures, and the politics of AI. The discussion-focused format invites participants to pose questions, share concepts, and highlight methodological challenges in an open exchange, rather than focusing on individual presentations. 

Mix methods! Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days are about exploring new methods—hands-on! Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images, but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—with contributions by Gabriele De Seta (University of Bergen), Marcus Burkhardt (University of Paderborn), Hendrik Bender (University of Siegen), Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam), Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen), Riccardo Ventura (Politecnico di Milano), Andrea Benedetti (Politecnico di Milano), Ángeles Briones (Politecnico di Milano), Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen), Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt (University of Siegen), Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen). 

Synthesize! Friday, 12 September 

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods. 

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation (SFB 1187) and Transformations of the Popular (SFB 1472) together with the Center of Digital Narrative in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture.

 The datafied Web and the beginnings of web tracking

 Do you remember…

… the beginnings of the internet in the 90s?
… the birth of web counters?’
… those digital pioneers who started to track our online activities?
… the novelty of seeing website visits measured in real-time?
… eye-catching graphics becoming the currency of our online attention?
… the early days of companies like Webtrends, Urchin and DoubleClick?

More than 40 presentations by over 70 researchers from 11 countries shape the program of the RESAW 2025 conference, focusing on early web development and tracing the historical roots of data-driven web tracking. The conference will take place on June 5 & 6 at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” in Siegen.

→ conference program

About the RESAW conference and community

RESAW is the acronym for A Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials. The RESAW community is dedicated to working with digital cultural heritage and gathers every two years at the eponymous RESAW conference.

RESAW was founded in 2012 with the goal of building a collaborative European research infrastructure for studying and working with web materials while fostering knowledge exchange across Europe. This presents significant challenges for both research and the archiving of web-based information and objects.

RESAW 2025 – The datafied Web at the University of Siegen

Over the last two decades the Web has become an integral part of European society, culture, business, and politics. However, web content disappears rapidly—the average lifetime of a web page is two months. To provide future access to this increasingly important digital cultural heritage, key research infrastructures in the form of national Web archives have been established in several European countries.

A web archive is a collection of web material that was born online. However, for the researcher who wants to study values and lifestyles, views and beliefs, identities and cultures across European borders, these national Web archives become an obstacle since they delimit the borderless flow of information on the internet with national barriers. High-quality research across borders requires free and efficient cross-border researcher access to national Web archives. To meet this need, RESAW will establish and operate a collaborative world-class trans- national European research infrastructure that enables cross-border studies of the archived Web by integrating and opening up existing Web archives.

RESAW mobilises a comprehensive consortium of partners, including the national Web archives of Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK, and the US-based Internet Archive, as well as six research institutions and one specialist consultancy company from six different Member States.

RESAW is in line with the EU’s ambitions expressed in The Digital Agenda for Europe, and it will provide services that do not exist today, putting Europe at the forefront in this field. By facilitating easy access to large amounts of cultural heritage, Big Data, and searching, selecting, and analysing the material, RESAW will make the research process more efficient and enhance the European Research Area. It is thus expected to have a transformative impact on a wide range of researchers who want to use material from national Web archives other than their own.

The sixth RESAW conference is dedicated to tracing the historical roots of the data-driven paradigm in web development. It closely examines trends, trajectories, and genealogies of a datafied and metric-driven web, as well as the rise of platform-based ecosystems. Investigating the historical context, aesthetics, and role of web counters, analytics tools, mobile sensors, and other metrics can contribute to a deeper understanding of online interactions, past publics and audiences, and their (at times problematic) developments.

The theme “The Datafied Web” also raises questions about methods and (web) archives that enable the study of this transformation: What challenges and methodologies arise in archiving a metrified and increasingly mobile web, including its back-end infrastructure? Additionally, the theme invites an exploration of the historical development of data collection and the evolution of web-based data monitoring practices. Related topics include the historical trajectories of tracking mechanisms, cookies, and the emergence of digital footprints, as well as the evolution of metric-dependent businesses and the financialisation of web spaces and their implications.

Taking a historical web analysis perspective, the conference examines mediated environments and asks: How has the datafied web shaped the sensory media environments in which we live today?

Highlights of RESAW 2025

To mark the 10th anniversary of the RESAW conference, a panel discussion organized by Niels Brügger will take place. Be sure to save the date: Friday afternoon, June 6.

A special highlight of this year’s conference are the keynote lectures on Thursday evening and Friday morning, delivered by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Associate Professor in Modern and Digital Culture at the University of Copenhagen, and Jonathan Gray, Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup will speak on “Vanishing Points: Technographies of Data Loss”, approaching the critical study of disappearance through the development of a technographic approach. Jonathan Gray will deliver a keynote on “Public Data Cultures”, historicizing the legal and technical conventions of open data.

Both keynotes aim to take a fresh look at the concept and practices of data: Web data is cultural material, a medium of participation and a site of transnational coordination.

A total of 22 panels at RESAW 2025 will feature over 70 presentations from researchers based in Siegen and across the international RESAW network—including participants from Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, the United States, Portugal, and Israel. On Thursday, panels will shed light on platforms and social media, monetization and web archiving practices, and dealing with data loss, among other topics. On the second day, the focus will be on the Skybox research programme, the history of platforms and research methods.

The conference promises insightful discussions on current research questions related to the trends, trajectories, and genealogies of a datafied and metric-driven web. It will also foster critical dialogue on the challenges and opportunities posed by the rise of platform-driven ecosystems.

The 2025 RESAW conference is organized by the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen in cooperation with the Centre for for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg. The conference is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) and the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).