Digital culture meets data: Critical perspectives

This special issue emerged from a need to explore how the turn to data is influencing work in digital culture and communication. Historically, digital culture is the focus of scholars positioned in a variety of disciplines that research digital cultures, including media and communication studies, digital humanities, science and society studies, and other critical theorists working at the intersections of social and cultural studies. The special issue ensued from the conference ‘Digital Culture meets data: Critical approaches’ organized by the Digital Culture and Communication Section of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) at the University of Brighton in November 2017. With Ryan Burns and others in the organizing committee, we invited delegates to consider both theoretical and empirical perspectives that combine critical data studies and studies of digital culture. We posed a number of questions and provocations: What does this turn to data mean for our research, scholarship, and pedagogic practice? How can new approaches to data be used to augment and diversify our research and educational approaches? But also, how might researchers challenge data paradigms or aim to show alternative or complementary ways to address digital culture and communication? Since the conference took place in 2017, a lot of critical accounts have been written in relation to data, with focus on workplace practices and employment patterns (Moore, 2017; Till, 2018), but also activist and citizen practices (Jenzen et al., 2020; Mendes et al., 2019; Milan, 2019; Stephansen and Trere, 2019). Many of us have been particularly concerned with gender identities, gendered practices, including digital motherhood practices (Cobb, 2020; Das, 2019; Fotopoulou, 2017; Jarrett, 2019; Rich, 2018, 2019; Thornham, 2018). And there is a wealth of literature around digital health practices and platform infrastructures (Charitsis, 2019, Williams et al., 2020, Lupton, 2017) and what these mean for algorithmic persons (Kant, 2020). In the business world, digital culture is seen as the result of technological innovation. When bloggers write about it they refer to the ways in which digital technologies are shaping our