Valuing Data: Attaching online data to stakes, selves, and other data

Susann Wagenknecht; Laura Kocksch; Stefan Laser; Ann-Kristin Kühnen

doi:10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.60-90

Authors

Susann Wagenknecht TUD Dresden University of Technology https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0533-9698
Laura Kocksch Aalborg University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4661-2638
Stefan Laser Ruhr-University Bochum https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6782-3496
Ann-Kristin Kühnen TUD Dresden University of Technology https://orcid.org/0009-0003-9859-829X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3384/VS.2001-5992.2024.11.1.60-90

Keywords:

digitized valuation, water, ethnography, attachment, post(actor-network theory), virtual collaboration

Abstract

As datafication proceeds rapidly, a large, unwieldy amount of data is available online. In this article, we ask: How valuable is this data, how is it made valuable? To answer this question, we study how online data is endowed with worth in virtual collaboration workshops. Our workshops challenged participants to assert and question the worth of online data – a challenge that participants addressed by using a set of techniques of which we describe collage, hierarchy building, and calculation. Data, we show, gains value through attachment. Thinking with attachment, we foreground affect, materiality, and the situatedness of valuing online data. As ethnographers, we study how data, as haphazard as it comes, is attached to the circumstances and stakes at hand, to ourselves and to other data. Our study contributes a conceptual perspective that attends to the shifting boundaries of the personal and the public, tensions between locality and generality, the role of contiguity, and the limits of combinatorial connectivity.

Author Biographies

Susann Wagenknecht, TUD Dresden University of Technology

Susann Wagenknecht holds the Junior Professorship in Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction at the Institute of Sociology at TUD Dresden University of Technology, Germany. She obtained her dissertation (‘A Social Epistemology of Research Groups’) from Aarhus University, Denmark. Drawing on ethnography, sociology and science and technology studies, she researches valuation at the private/public interface as well as the design, maintenance and use of infrastructure (of data, traffic and energy).

Laura Kocksch, Aalborg University

Laura Kocksch works as a post-doctoral researcher in the techno-anthropology lab (TANTlab) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. She recently defended her doctoral dissertation (‘Fragile Computing –Theorizing Cybersecurity as Practice’) summa cum laude at Ruhr University Bochum. Her work centres in ethnographies of data matters – material infrastructure, cybersecurity and planetary resources. She uses a combination of qualitative methods and data design to craft prolonged situations of observation and intervention.

Stefan Laser, Ruhr-University Bochum

Stefan Laser is a dost-doctoral researcher with the Collaborative Research Center ‘Virtual Live Worlds’ at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany, investigating the entanglement of knowledge practices and planetary resources through data centres. Formerly, he was studying train infrastructures in transformation at Siegen University, Germany; and from 2013–2018 he conducted his doctoral studies on the global value chains of electronic waste at the sociology department at Kassel University, Germany. Stefan has published in the fields of valuation studies, waste studies, economic sociology and digital methods.

Ann-Kristin Kühnen, TUD Dresden University of Technology

Ann-Kristin Kühnen is a doctoral candidate and research assistant at the chair of Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction at the Institute of Sociology at TUD Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Her research focuses on (feminist) science and technology studies (STS), new materialism and political ecology.

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