On February 19-20, members of the Deep Culture project co-organized a workshop on “Boundaries & boundary concepts in/as datafication” together with Yana Boeva (University of Stuttgart) and Sarah Davies (University of Vienna) in Amsterdam. While boundary concepts, such as “boundary objects”, “boundary-work”, “boundary infrastructures”, or “boundary-drawing”, have long played a key role in science and technology studies (STS) and adjacent fields, the broader computational turn raises the question of the analytical purchase of these concepts today. How do boundary concepts become reconfigured in the context of datafication and AI? To what extent do these concepts need to be refined?
Across two days, the workshop gathered researchers interested in discussing these questions across a range of empirical contexts and cases, each engaging with boundary concepts in distinct and innovative ways. The presentations ranged from studies of urban contexts through data & AI infrastructures to questions of state, borders, and identities. Our collective discussions revealed a shared interest in questions of scale (central to both computation today and formulations of boundary concepts), the distinctiveness of data/datafication, how boundary concepts account for power relations, and how boundary concepts shape our empirical analyses (both what they make visible and what they obscure).
We are very excited to continue these discussions and already looking forward to seeing where they will take us. Our aim is to work towards sharing the workshop results via some form of publication in the future.
We would like to warmly thank all of our workshop participants for taking an interest in these questions and for joining us to discuss them: thank you Sam Bennett (Durham University), Kelly Bescherer (Leuphana University Lüneburg), Benedetta Catanzariti (The University of Edinburgh), Juliette Davret (Maynooth University), Catharina Dietrich (Goethe University Frankfurt), Oksana Dorofeeva (Aarhus University), Kristian Bondo Hansen (Copenhagen Business School), Fatih Karakaya (Istanbul University), Joyce Koranteng-Acquah (Technical University of Munich), Julia Malik (University of Klagenfurt), Sandeep Mertia (Stevens Institute of Technology), Pouya Sepehr (Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research), and Ben Skelding (University of Vienna).