News
Interdisciplinary perspectives on the interfaces of technologies, sounds, and people
published by Christoph Borbach (University of Siegen, CRC 1187), Timo Kaerlein (Ruhr-University Bochum), Robert Stock (Humboldt University Berlin) and Sabine Wirth (Bauhaus University Weimar)
The anthology “Acoustic Interfaces: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Interfaces between Technologies, Sounds, and People” published by Springer as an open-access book, opens up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces.
About the book
In today’s media culture, acoustic interfaces are becoming increasingly important, as can be seen in many areas of everyday life such as work, mobility, and leisure. This volume takes this development as an opportunity to open up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces in order to highlight the significance of acoustics for the differentiation of contemporary interface cultures. The recent ubiquity of smart speakers, natural language processing, and voice user interfaces indicates a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction, whose media-cultural significance can only be adequately addressed through a comparative analysis from the perspectives of media and sound studies, ludomusicology, and dis/ability studies. Only digital infrastructures and machine learning algorithms make voice assistant technologies a social reality. This invites us to subject their cultural and technological history, media practice, affordances, and platformization to closer examination, combining aesthetic and technical as well as historical and computational approaches to analysis. In this way, the diverse and contradictory politics of acoustic interfaces are explored in depth and in their development in the 20th and 21st centuries. The analysis thus goes beyond a purely present-day diagnosis and at the same time formulates critical positions for the contextualization of future acoustic interface technologies.
The anthology includes contributions by Christoph Borbach, research assistant in project P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing” together with Benjamin Lindquist on “Bodies, Voices, Prostheses. A History of Talking Interfaces as Assistive Technologies“ and by Tim Hector, research assistant in project B06 ”Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households“ together with Benedikt Merkle on “Tools and Media Practices. Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Paradigm of Object-Oriented Programming”.
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.
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.
Dissertation on linguistic practices with voice assistants from project B06 published
by Tim Hector (University of Siegen)
Tim Hector’s dissertation, which he wrote as part of his research work in project B06: “Un/solicited observation in interaction”, has been published as an open access publication in the “Empirical Linguistics” series by De Gruyter.
About Smart Speakers in Dialogue
The dissertation “Smart Speakers in Dialogue. Linguistic Practices with Voice User Interfaces” examines voice assistants from a linguistic perspective. The focus is on smart speakers such as “Alexa” or “Google Home.” These devices are voice-controlled and provide, among other things, music or weather information. The study investigates how dialogue with these devices is linguistically organized, what practices emerge, and how the devices are integrated into everyday life.
The work combines theoretical discussions on praxeology and domestication with an empirical analysis of audio and video recordings. The corpus includes situations of initial installation and everyday use. For audio recordings in everyday life, a specially developed device was used that automatically captures voice commands (Conditional Voice Recorder, see our CRC-Working Paper No. 23). Methodologically, the dissertation follows a qualitative research design and draws on principles of conversation analysis.
The analyses show for dyadic dialogues (i.e., one person and one device), that address terms such as “Alexa” are newly functionalized and that the course of conversations must follow strict sequential patterns. Practices from other conversation-analytic categories—such as turn-taking or repair—remain visible but are technically reshaped. New practices also emerge, such as deliberate interruptions (barge-ins).
In multi-party situations, smart speakers are sometimes framed linguistically as participants, sometimes as objects. Particularly noteworthy is a “formal-functional split”: utterances that appear to be addressed to devices often serve other purposes—such as humor, frustration management, or the domestication of resistant technology.
About the author
Tim Hector is a postdoctoral researcher in project B06: “Un/desired Observation in Interaction – Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households”. He finished his PhD in Applied Linguistics in 2024 and conducts research in media and cultural linguistics, conversation analysis, and linguistic praxeology.
About drivers of the fourth industrial revolution
About the special issue
Digital twins are currently the most important drivers of the fourth industrial revolution. Ever more complex technical products and processes are now developed and tested in the virtual sphere before they emerge in the “real” world. Future artefacts and practices are first produced as software models and simulated as digital twins. The prevalence of digital twins in industry and research creates a fundamental paradigm shift in digital-media technologies. The digital is neither a real-time virtual representation of a real-world physical object nor an entirely separate object: it is much more, for it allows for the analysis of future performances of objects without the physical presence of these objects.
Digital twins represent the techno-ideological paradigm of our time. They have their own ethos in the context of a technocratic view of the world, which presumes that everything observable or at least sense-able can also be made countable, accountable, and computable. While digital twinning originally only involved technical systems, it nowadays also predicts other parameters, such as human movement patterns and occasionally also social aspects. Digital twins are thus emblematic and paradigmatic of a technocratic view of the world defined by the belief that everything can be calculated and controlled. Digital twins are technopolitical artefacts, or rather, they are inscribed with a techno-ecology, as they are increasingly involved in institutional decision-making that can ultimately affect us all. It is in this context that digital twins unfold their true power.
Christoph Borbach, Wendy H.K. Chun, and Tristan Thielmann took this situation as an opportunity to co-edit a special issue of New Media & Society on “Digital Twinning”. The special issue is now available online, with most contributions in open access. Their co-authored editorial “Making everything ac-count-able: The digital twinning paradigm” can be found here.
Some of the contributions are related to the 2023 annual conference of the CRC 1187 on “Digital Twins & Doubles. Data of Cooperations.”
On Pre-technological Media
by Erhard Schüttpelz (University of Siegen/CRC)
If we have always lived in a media society, what are media actually? Erhard Schüttpelz explores this question in his new book Medium, Medium: Elemente einer Anthropologie (Medium, Medium: Elements of an Anthropology).
About the Book
Nowadays, the term “medium” is often used in connection with technology, although media have long existed in other mediating roles between humans and non-humans. With this study, Schüttpelz shifts the perspective of media studies and asks the question of what media actually are.
Editoral text:
When we think of media, we usually have in mind its manifestation in technical devices, from the first telegraph to today’s communication and storage media. This ignores the fact that the term medium also has a meaning that existed before technology, in which it refers to those who can mediate between heaven and earth, between the living and the dead, between those present and those absent. If mediality can be understood over millennia as a practice that connects humans and non-humans, a rupture takes place in the modern age: Media fall into one with technology, and a diverse strangeness of media becomes an interplay of prosthesis and remote control.
In his groundbreaking study, Erhard Schüttpelz shifts the perspective of media studies: from weapon to container, from writing to language, from magic to ritual. And he poses the question of what media actually are if we have always lived in media societies.
About the Author
Erhard Schüttpelz has been Professor of Media Theory at the University of Siegen since 2005 after studying German, English and Ethnology in Hanover, Exeter and Bonn and conducting research in Oxford, Cologne, New York, Constance and Vienna. He is the principle investigator of the project P02 “Media of Praxeology II: Anthropology of Cooperation: Skill, Deixis, Interaction” at the CRC 1187.
How does intelligent, sensor-based media technologies change everyday household practices?
by Tim Hector, Niklas Strüver, Stephan Habscheid and Dagmar Hoffmann (all Siegen University, CRC)
In our new Working Paper (No. 36) “Sensory Practices in the Smart Home. Findings and Methodological Reflections from an Interdisciplinary Pilot Study”, Tim Hector, Niklas Strüver, Stephan Habscheid and Dagmar Hoffmann present the first results of their interdisciplinary pilot study on how smart home devices change household ecologies and processes. The study is part of their research project at the CRC, which studies the domestication of smart technologies as a case of cooperative production of media and data.
About the Working Paper
The working paper presents, as a proof of concept, initial findings from an interdisciplinary pilot study that employs methods from sociological and linguistic media research to investigate how everyday household practices are represented and transformed through smart, sensor-based media technologies, which can be observed as multimodal interactions. Within the framework of the project “B06 – Un-/Desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households” in the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation”, the domestication of smart technologies is examined as a case of the cooperative production of media and data—both with and without consent (Star and Griesemer 1989).The focus of the presented pilot study is on human-machine cooperation, in which the more or less noticeable capture of behavioral and environmental data by sensors contributes to the semi-automated shaping of household ecologies and processes. We reconstruct and analyze forms of interaction and communication with interfaces of these modern technologies, as well as the sensory orientations and bodily practices of users. Furthermore, we examine the spatial and material arrangements that are essential for the social and communicative organization, as well as the purposiveness and goal-directedness of socio-technical actions involving these devices. We present exploratory media-sociological and media-linguistic analyses of a living environment equipped with smart devices, exemplified by two specific devices: an Amazon Echo Show (10th gen.), a ‘rotating’ smart speaker with a voice user interface, camera, display, video/touch screen, and camera-based motion detection, and a smart, internet-connected air fryer. The study demonstrates that users are embedded in human-machine interaction through their human sensorium—both socio-cognitively and physically—and are challenged in situ to make various decisions.
About the auhtors
Tim Hector (Dr. des.) works as a researcher at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation« in the project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes« at Siegen University. He did a PhD in applied linguistics on the linguistic domestication of voice assistants. His research interests include media and cultural linguistics, conversation analysis linguistic domestication of media technologies and spoken language in human-computer-interaction. Niklas Strüver (M.A.) works as a researcher at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation« in the project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes« at Siegen University. He is a doctoral student at the graduate school MGK of the CRC, studying Voice Assistants as sociotechnical phenomena.
Stephan Habscheid (Prof. Dr.) is a professor of German studies and applied linguistics at Universität Siegen. He is principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes« at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, Universität Siegen (together with Dagmar Hoffmann). His research interests include media linguistics, linguistic praxeology, language in institutions and organizations as well as small talk and conversation. Dagmar Hoffmann (Prof. Dr.) is a professor of media sociology and gender media studies at Universität Siegen, Germany. She is principal investigator in the interdisciplinary project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes«« at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, Universität Siegen (together with Stephan Habscheid). Her research is focused on media and cultural sociology, digital literacy, and political participation.
Über die Working Paper Reihe
The Working Paper Series of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 „Media of Cooperation“ promotes inter- and transdisciplinary media research. The CRC Working Paper Series provides an avenue for rapid publication and dissemination of ongoing research at or associated with the CRC. The Working Paper Series aims to circulate in-progress research to the wider research community beyond the CRC. Publication in the Working Paper Series does not preclude publication of a more developed version of the same paper in another journal. Contributions from established academics and postdoctoral researchers are welcome. The articles are published in open access and a limited number of print copies. We ask interested parties to send a paper proposal (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note (max. 50 words). Please follow our style guide for manuscript submission.
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – Project number 262513311 – SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation. Series’ editor: Dr. Karina Kirsten, University of Siegen & CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation.
„digital:gender – de:mapping affect. a speculative cartography”
edited by Julia Bee (Ruhr-University Bochum), Irina Gradinari (Fernuniversität Hagen) and Katrin Köppert (Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig)
How do digital objects influence our critical thinking when they affect our emotions? Julia Bee explores this question together with colleagues in the publication digital:gender – de:mapping affect. a speculative cartography, published in 2025.
About the book
The publication looks at the intersections that now exist between gender studies and the objects of digital media culture—memes, apps, posts. Speculative experiments are carried out to test out entry points to the contemporary constellations of digital media culture and gender theory approaches using individual objects. Feeling and affect play a key role here: having our emotions appealed to by artistic and media objects changes our critical thinking about them. The “cartography” of contemporary digital media culture thus constitutes a situated method.
About the Author
Julia Bee is a professor of Gender Media Studies at Ruhr-University Bochum, with a special focus on diversity. In her research, she focuses on intersectional approaches and gender media theory. She leads the projects B09 “Bicycle Media. Cooperative Media of Mobility” and Ö “Public Relations: Cooperative Research and Design” at the Collaborative Research Centre.
Irina Gradinari is Junior Professor of Gender Studies at FernUniversität in Hagen. Katrin Köppert is Junior Professor of Art History/Popular Cultures at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
“Seeing Style: How Style Orients Phenopractices across Action, Media, Space, and Time”
Niklas Woermann (University of Southern Denmark)
How do media practices shape our perception and interaction? Niklas Woermann, 2021 Mercator Fellow at the CRC, explores this question in his book Seeing Style.
About the Book
Based on an ethnographic study of the freeskiing subculture, the book develops a theory of phenopractices – embodied practices of the perception and expression of style. By combining approaches from phenomenology, cultural sociology and media research, Woermann provides new impulses on the role of visual order in social practices. An exciting read for anyone concerned with media, practices and cultural perception!
Editoral text:
“How do social practices prefigure experiences, and how does embodied experience organize the performance of practices? This book suggests that the classic concept of style offers a fresh answer to the question how doings and sayings are linked into practice bundles.
Based on a rich ethnographic study of the visual practices of the German-speaking freeskiing subculture, this work develops a theory of phenopractices, or embodied cultural practices dedicated to apprehending and expressing style. Focusing on the visual dimension, it extends the thought of Garfinkel and Schatzki using recent insights from science and technology studies and research at the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology. This offers a new perspective on fundamental practice-theoretical questions about the nature of practice elements, social order in the context of rules and regularity, or action and practical intelligibility.
Each chapter discusses and develops foundational concepts such as time, space, action, emotion, or perception based on an analysis of freeskiing practices such as planning a route in the backcountry, testing a new ski model, or judging freestyle contests. The central argument is that cultural styles of conduct are not only symbolic structures, but a functional resource which organizes situational intelligibility and thus enables social order based on aligned and managed embodied routines. Because the stabilization, dissemination, and evolution of such styles happens via different media, practice change is primarily influenced by media rather than symbolic, rational, or functional needs or ends.
A rich ethnography and provocative theoretical argument of interest to anyone working on contemporary practice thought, advancing phenomenology, the sociology of vision, lifestyle sports, media, or practice evolution.”
Niklas Woermann is Head of Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of Marketing and Management at SDU Business School at the University of Southern Denmark. He was appointed Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago in 2018 and 2021 Mercator Fellow in the CRC 11877 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen and is associated with Project B08 – Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy. His research focuses how technology shapes consumer experience, services, and interactions. Multidisciplinary in his education, research and outlook, Niklas has published his work in outlets such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Marketing Theory and American Behavioural Scientist, as well as key publishers in sociology. Niklas, a distinguished marketing and sociology scholar, served on editorial boards, won the “Outstanding Reviewer Award” at JCR, and reviewed for the ERC. He received the “Sidney J. Levy Award” and a “Swiss National Research Foundation” scholarship.
The “Beiträge zur Praxeologie / Contributions to Praxeology” aim to place practice above all other explanatory variables and to gain, clarify or correct the basic theoretical concepts from this pre-ordering. Both the works of Wittgenstein and those of Schütz and Garfinkel refer to a common Central European genealogy of “praxeology”, which has, however, remained largely unknown to this day. The series therefore aims to develop in three directions: through philosophical theoretical work, through empirical contributions to theory formation and through contributions to the revision of the history of science.
Investigating the interplay of media, data, and language in domestic environments – now available as an open-access volume
von Stephan Habscheid (University of Siegen)/ Tim Hector (University of Siegen)/ Dagmar Hoffmann (University of Siegen)/ David Waldecker (TU Darmstadt) (Eds.)
We are delighted to announce the publication of Voice Assistants in Private Homes: Media, Data, and Language in Interaction and Discourse, an interdisciplinary volume edited by Stephan Habscheid, Tim Hector, Dagmar Hoffmann, and David Waldecker from our CRC. This open-access book provides various contributions regarding voice assistant technologies and their integration into daily life.
The new volume examines voice assistants from different angles, including perspectives of linguistics, sociology, media studies, HCI-research and law, addressing issues such as media and data practices, surveillance, data capitalism, anthropomorphisation, privacy concerns, and the domestication of technology in households. The volume is freely available online through open-access publishing with transcript – you can download the ebook here.
Contributions include analyses of linguistic practices and conceptualisations, studies on capitalist practices and the negotiation of surveillance and privacy as well as reflections on the sociotechnical dynamics of voice assistants. The book also considers broader implications for data ethics and AI development with an outlook on the latest developments in the rise of Large Language Models. The compliation also includes an interview with Nikolai Horn, political advisor on ethical and legal aspects of the digital sphere, dealing with voice assistants and the GDPR.
This publication is essential reading for researchers dealing with human-machine-dialogs, platform technologies, issues of surveillance, privacy and data protection in linguistics, media studies, sociology, and related fields, in particular (but not limited to) those interested in the role of intelligent personal assistants.
The book is part of the Media in Action book series, edited by the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.
About the researchers
Stephan Habscheid (Prof. Dr.) is a professor of German studies and applied linguistics at Universität Siegen. He is principal investigator of the interdisciplinary project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes« at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, Universität Siegen (together with Dagmar Hoffmann). His research interests include media linguistics, linguistic praxeology, language in institutions and organizations as well as small talk and conversation. Tim Hector (Dr. des.) works as a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation« in the project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes« at Universität Siegen. He did a PhD in applied linguistics on the linguistic domestication of voice assistants. His research interests include media and cultural linguistics, conversation analysis linguistic domestication of media technologies and spoken language in human-computer-interaction.
Dagmar Hoffmann (Prof. Dr.) is a professor of media sociology and gender media studies at Universität Siegen, Germany. She is principal investigator in the interdisciplinary project B06 »Un/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body and Senses in Private Homes«« at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, Universität Siegen (together with Stephan Habscheid). Her research is focused on media and cultural sociology, digital literacy, and political participation. David Waldecker (Dr.) is a sociologist and an academic librarian in training at Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt. He was a post-doc at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 »Media of Cooperation«, Universität Siegen, and published his dissertation on Adorno in the recording studio in 2022.
About the Media in Action Series
The open access series Media in Action, conceived by the DFG Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation”, examines the history and present of networked, data-intensive media and their social implications at the interdisciplinary interface of social and media sciences. In the tradition of science and technology studies and actor-network theory, the German and English-language monographs, anthologies and dissertations in the series focus on the practices, (co-)operations and procedures in the use, production and analysis of old and new media. A central challenge facing the series is the development of appropriate ethnographic, digital, sensor-based and design-oriented methods for a new conception of the description of distributed ‘agency’ between people, computers, bodies and environments. The Media in Action Series is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – project number 262513311 – CRC 1187. The series is edited by Timo Kaerlein, Isabell Otto and Tristan Thielmann.
1 / 4