Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive of over 1500 titles.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
The book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are interwoven with journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilize and achieve legitimacy. It does so across empirical sites such as anti-COVID-19 protest movements, newsrooms in media organizations, comment sections, Facebook groups and data science departments inside media organizations. Building on rich empirical analysis it shows how publics are constructed and negotiated in the intersection of audience agency, digital infrastructures and media cultivation. It conceptualizes publicness as modalities, emphasizing stratification, legitimization, visibility, attention and recognition, and illustrates how datafication as a value system and discourse has an impact on those modalities.
Metadata tags are key to visibility in today’s datafied world as they organize news articles through meta-information that allows news to be recognized by algorithms and disseminated across the web. For the news media, this means that news must be classified according to predefined categories. This chapter examines metatags of 260 European news websites and determines the extent to which they apply metatags that allow webpages to be featured in Google search results. Furthermore, the chapter examines how media organizations are compliant with the metadata library of Schema.org, which is organized by, among others, Yandex, Google and the World Wide Web Consortium. While a majority of media are compliant with Google and Schema.org libraries, only a few large organizations utilize these to the full extent. Finally, the chapter discusses the impact for mediated public formation in the context of access to information via the news delivered through search engines.
This concluding chapter takes stock of the contributions made by this volume, in which we developed the concept of datapublics to understand the transformations that have affected the fields of journalism and media. We suggest seeing the construction of publics as hybrid – not directly connected to any specific media space or enabled by any specific technology – as a struggle between different normative ideals embodied in publics, and as a process involving different modalities of publicness and datafication. Publicness (attention, visibility, legitimacy, hierarchization and valorization) and datafication (as a process, a discourse and a value-system) become physical, virtual and imagined spaces in which struggles for the construction of datapublics take place, struggles that affect not only how datapublics come into being in datafied societies, but with all actors involved in their formation.
This chapter explores citizens’ attempts to gather as publics across physical as well as new and old mediated spaces in an endeavour to make themselves count in today’s datafied, hybrid media system. Processes of public formation have fundamentally changed due to digitalization and datafication, and we explore these changes through a case study of COVID-19 sceptics in Denmark as a paradigmatic case of counterpublicness. We approach the case through an explorative framework for the understanding of public formation processes that focuses on concrete discursive manifestations while also recognizing how publicity and the understanding of different media logics are essential for being recognized as legitimate actors. In the chapter, we present a typology of tactics where we distinguish between mobilization tactics, counter-tactics and publicity tactics. Furthermore, we illustrate how overarching datafied hybrid quantification logics highly drives these tactics. Finally, we discuss the importance of following processes of public formation and datafication across contexts to fully grasp how constraints in one space might induce a shift to another and, therefore, how these logics and tactics flow between spaces.
The book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are interwoven with journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilize and achieve legitimacy. It does so across empirical sites such as anti-COVID-19 protest movements, newsrooms in media organizations, comment sections, Facebook groups and data science departments inside media organizations. Building on rich empirical analysis it shows how publics are constructed and negotiated in the intersection of audience agency, digital infrastructures and media cultivation. It conceptualizes publicness as modalities, emphasizing stratification, legitimization, visibility, attention and recognition, and illustrates how datafication as a value system and discourse has an impact on those modalities.
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This book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are embedded in journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilise and achieve legitimacy.
This is a seminal contribution to the debates about the future of media, journalism and civic practices.
This chapter develops an argument against the soft determinism implied in the way publics are said to be affected by data and algorithmic power. To do so, we introduce a sociocultural approach, focusing on media consumption as a distinct moment from media production, the actual locus of algorithmic power. The chapter argues that we need to distinguish between our ‘uses of media’ – what is essentially captured as data and turned into (limited) knowledge – and our sociocultural practices – which remain to date largely invisible and incomprehensible to the data episteme. The gap between uses and practices provides a reflexive space of agency for users to escape algorithmic power, which are conceptualized in relation to two moments in the data loop (Mathieu and Pruulmann Vengerfeldt, 2020) as inspective agency and inscriptive agency.
This chapter uses the concept of ‘imaginaries’ as an overarching heuristic to analyse how publics are discursively constructed through imaginaries of measurement technologies. We illustrate this empirically through a case study of a technological drama, the launching of and responses to a personalization algorithm at the New York Times. Thus, we argue first that different imaginaries of the public and the press as cultivators of those publics are invoked when attempting to legitimize or delegitimize emergent technologies. Second, by linking our case study to a historization of the increasingly datafied distribution and audience measurement technologies, we explore how publics/audiences are constructed differently as new measurement technologies emerge, from democratic collectives to segmented consumers, and finally, with the introduction of personalized recommendations as aggregated datapoints.
The book addresses new challenges to the formation of publics in datafied democracies. It proposes a fresh, complex and nuanced approach to understand ‘datapublics’, by considering datafication and public formation in the context of audience, journalism and infrastructure studies.
The tightly woven chapters shed new light on how platforms, algorithms and their data infrastructure are interwoven with journalistic values, discourses and practices, opening up new conditions for publics to display agency, mobilize and achieve legitimacy. It does so across empirical sites such as anti-COVID-19 protest movements, newsrooms in media organizations, comment sections, Facebook groups and data science departments inside media organizations. Building on rich empirical analysis it shows how publics are constructed and negotiated in the intersection of audience agency, digital infrastructures and media cultivation. It conceptualizes publicness as modalities, emphasizing stratification, legitimization, visibility, attention and recognition, and illustrates how datafication as a value system and discourse has an impact on those modalities.
This chapter examines the digital infrastructure connected to media website architecture and discusses effects of such infrastructures on journalistic ideals of providing the information needed to enable a democratic public (cf Strömbäck, 2005; Fenton, 2010). By using the media tech stacks as our point of departure, we first map and categorize the systems sustaining journalism. We find that three functional categories of technologies can be observed in the media tech stacks: production and publishing technologies; distribution technologies; and technologies that enable the commercial viability of media. Next, by mapping third-party web services found on 361 European media websites, we uncover that the media in general rely heavily on Big Tech-provided systems for the production and distribution of journalistic content. In addition, we observe a large quantity of ‘small tech’ which tend to be overlooked in discursive tales around the dominance of Big Tech. Finally, we discuss the democratic significance of the systemic interdependency between journalistic media and the technological infrastructures.
