David B. Nieborg is Associate Professor of Media Studies. Currently, he is a Faculty Research Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and a Residential Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He holds a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam and held visiting & fellowship appointments with MIT, the Queensland University of Technology, the University of Amsterdam, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. David has a past career as a consultant, a newspaper journalist, and co-founded an award-winning game company. He published widely on the game industry, app and platform economics, and game journalism in academic outlets, such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Policy Review, and Media, Culture and Society. His research has been funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He is the co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021), which is translated into Italian and Chinese. His most recent co-authored book is Mainstreaming and Game Journalism (MIT Press, 2023).
Anne Helmond is Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. She is part of the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society’ where she examines the processes of platformization, algorithmization, and datafication from an empirical and historical perspective by focusing on the material and programmable (data) infrastructures underpinning these processes. In addition, she is working on developing digital methods for examining how apps and app stores mediate sociocultural issues and practices and for inquiring into the political economy of mobile data flows. Her work has been published in highly-ranked peer-reviewed journals such as Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, Theory, Culture and Society, Social Media + Society, First Monday, and Computational Culture. From 2017–2020 she held a Veni grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) for the project ‘App ecosystems: A critical history of apps.’ In this project she developed novel digital methods for analysing apps, app stores, and app ecosystems to understand the emergence of this new cultural form.
Fernando van der Vlist is Assistant Professor and programme coordinator for the Master’s Cultural Data & AI in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands. His research focuses on the critical study of digital platforms and apps, their ecosystems, data, and artificial intelligence (AI) in culture and society. He co-directs the international App Studies Initiative (ASI) and is affiliated with the Digital Methods Initiative (DMI), the Public Data Lab, and the UvA’s School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR). Prior to his current position, Fernando worked as a postdoctoral Researcher in the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society’ (GDS) at Utrecht University and the DFG Collaborative Research Centre ‘Media of Cooperation’ at the University of Siegen, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). His research has been published in leading scholarly journals in the interdisciplinary field of Media Studies, including Big Data & Society, New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Policy Review, Internet Histories, AI & Society, Convergence, Surveillance & Society, and Computational Culture, and has been funded through the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). Fernando received his PhD from Utrecht University in 2022 and holds an MA and BA from the University of Amsterdam, as well as a BDes from the Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA). His PhD thesis, titled The Platform as Ecosystem: Configurations and Dynamics of Governance and Power, unearths the intricate dynamics of governance and power within digital platform ecosystems, offering critical insights into the political economy and power of platforms. You can follow him on Google Scholar, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or visit his homepage.
Carolin Gerlitz is Professor for Digital Media and Methods at the University of Siegen, Germany. Her work is situated at the intersection between digital culture and economic sociology with a particular interest in dynamics of social web economies. She is involved in a series of collaborative projects on social media, Facebook’s Like economy, time online, numbers, metrics, topology and digital (social) research. She completed her PhD on brands, participatory cultures and continuous economies in 2012 at the Department for Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London and worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Amsterdam afterwards. Carolin holds a four year NWO Veni grant for her project ‘Numbering Life. Measures and Metrics in Digital Media’ and is PI of a project on apps and their ecologies as part of the German collaborative research centre “Media of Cooperation”.
Thomas Poell is Professor of Data, Culture & Institutions at the University of Amsterdam. Leveraging social media data and digital methods, he has studied how digital platforms are reshaping the mobilisation, organisation, and communication of protest around the globe. In recent years, he has examined how platforms are intervening in crucial sectors of society. Poell is co-author of Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) and The Platform Society (Oxford University Press, 2018). Furthermore, he co-edited The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2018), Social Media Materialities and Protest (Routledge, 2018), and Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave/McMillan, 2017).
Esther Weltevrede is Assistant Professor of New Media & Digital Culture at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is a founding member of the Digital Methods Initiative research collective, investigating digital culture from a medium-specific perspective. Her research interests include software studies, platform studies and issue mapping. In her dissertation ‘Repurposing digital methods: The research affordances of platforms and engines’ she develops the notion of ‘research affordances’ envisioning online platforms as infrastructures that facilitate and engage specific research questions and practices. Her work has been published in academic outlets such as Big Data & Society, Theory, Culture and Society, Journal of Cultural Economy, First Monday and CHI.
Johannes Paßmann is Junior Professor of „History and Theory of Social Media and Platforms“ at Ruhr University Bochum and Principal Investigator at University of Siegen’s SFB 1472 „Transformations of the Popular“. Until 2021, he was a research associate at Siegen University (Digital Media & Methods team). Johannes was a research fellow at Locating Media, a postgraduate program funded by the German research foundation, worked as a lecturer in the Department of Media & Culture Studies at Utrecht University (NL), was visiting researcher at the Nordic Centre for Internet & Society (Oslo, NO) and visiting lecturer at the media studies department of the University of Basel (CH).
Daniel Joseph is a Senior Lecturer of Digital Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. His prior research has focused on a variety of topics such as cultural and industrial policy related to the production of games, the political economy of the digital game distribution platform Steam, and the role digital technology plays in Marxist crisis theory. His current research focuses on the past, present, and future of social inequalities in digital infrastructure and app stores. He has published articles in the Journal of Consumer Culture, Social Media + Society, Games and Culture, The Canadian Journal of Communication, Triple C, and Loading. He has also worked as an organizer to advocate unionization in the games industry with Game Workers Unite and has written as a freelance writer for magazines such as Vice’s Waypoint, Jacobin, Real Life Mag, and Briarpatch.
Chris J. Young is a Librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga. His research is in the field of media and communication studies with knowledge in media industries, digital labour, and app economies, specifically engaging in discourse around the circuits of game production. Some of his recent work has appeared in New Media & Society, Television & New Media, and Social Media + Society.
Stefanie Duguay is Concordia University Research Chair in Digital Intimacy, Gender and Sexuality and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, Canada. Her research focuses on the intersection of digital media with representations and practices pertaining to relationships, gender, and sexuality. This has involved studies of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people’s social media participation and self-representation as well as studies of dating apps, platform appropriation, social media governance, discourses of automation and algorithmic neutrality, and the role of social and mobile media in queer social landscapes. Dr. Duguay’s research has been published in New Media & Society; Social Media + Society; Information, Communication & Society; and other outlets.
Jeremy Morris is an Professor in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the digitization of the cultural industries. He is author of Selling Digital Music, Formatting Culture (University of California Press, 2015) and has published widely on new media, music technologies, podcasting as well as apps and the appification of software in journals such as New Media and Society, Fibreculture, Popular Communication, and The Journal of Radio and Audio Media. Along with Sarah Murray, he is co-editor of a collection entitled Appified: Culture in the Age of Apps (University of Michigan Press, 2018), which examines the impact of apps on media products and cultural practices. He is currently working on a manuscript entitled App Culture, which looks at the culture of apps (i.e. the rise of the app as a new format for the software commodity) and app culture (i.e. the ways in which software developers are adjusting to this new form of software production, distribution and consumption). He is also the founder of PodcastRE.org, a large database that tracks, indexes and preserves podcasts, allowing researchers to analyze sonic culture.
Nathaniel Tkacz is a Professor of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work focuses on the cultural, political, economic and organisational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms. He has authored/edited 5 books, including Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness (University of Chicago Press, 2015). His most recent book is Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life (Polity Press, 2022). His recent research has contributed to the emerging areas of interface criticism and the social and cultural study of apps.
Michael Dieter is associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), University of Warwick. His current research focuses on developing inventive methods for interface criticism, focussed in particular on contemporary user-experience design epistemologies and techniques for social media platforms and mobile apps. His other research interests include genealogies of media at the intersection of aesthetic and political thought, contemporary media art and publishing practices after digitisation.
T. H. Jason Chao is a full-stack software developer with 10+ years of experience. He holds an MSc. degree in Big Data and Digital Futures from the University of Warwick and a degree in Human Rights Law from SOAS, University of London. He is an advocate of human rights and LGBT+ equality from East Asia.