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Phd Dissertation A Service of Leibniz-Informationszentrum econstor Wirtschaft Leibniz Information Centre Make Your Publications Visible. zbw for Economics Koed Madsen, Anders Doctoral Thesis Web-Visions: Repurposing digital traces to organize social attention PhD Series, No. 26.2013 Provided in Cooperation with: Copenhagen Business School (CBS) Suggested Citation: Koed Madsen, Anders (2013) : Web-Visions: Repurposing digital traces to organize social attention, PhD Series, No. 26.2013, ISBN 9788792977656, Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg, http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8746 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/208861 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. personal and scholarly purposes. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle You are not to copy documents for public or commercial Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, If the documents have been made available under an Open gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ www.econstor.eu Web-Visions copenhagen business school handelshøjskolen solbjerg plads 3 dk-2000 frederiksberg danmark www.cbs.dk Web-Visions Repurposing digital traces to organize social attention Anders Koed Madsen PhD Series 26.2013 ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-92977-64-9 Doctoral School of Organisation Online ISBN: 978-87-92977-65-6 and Management Studies PhD Series 26.2013 Web-Visions Repurposing digital traces to organize social attention Anders Koed Madsen Vejledere: Maja Horst, Anders Kristian Munk, Noortje Marres, Peter Kjær Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies Copenhagen Business School Anders Koed Madsen Web-Visions Repurposing digital traces to organize social attention 1st edition 2013 PhD Series 26.2013 © The Author ISSN 0906-6934 Print ISBN: 978-87-92977-64-9 Online ISBN: 978-87-92977-65-6 The Doctoral School of Organisation and Management Studies (OMS) is an interdisciplinary research environment at Copenhagen Business School for PhD students working on theoretical and empirical themes related to the organisation and management of private, public and voluntary organizations. All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Acknowledgements Even though every potential flaw and vauge argumentation in this dissertation is solely my responsibility, it is clear that the achievement of writing a doctoral dissertation is something that involve more than one lonely scholar. In my case I have been so fortunate that I have spent the last three years together with inspiring and caring people that have offered their help in relation to discussing my ideas and formulating them in a somewhat understable manner. Such kindness need to be acknowledged and on the most general note I would like to thank all my colleagues at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School. What a place to work! From the moment I entered the beautiful building of Kilen I have been met with a genuine interest in both what I was working on and an even more genuine interest in discussing reserach, teaching and life in general over cold beers at Svejk, Bartof and Café Intime. The vibe at the departent is truly special and I cannot imagine a better environment to have conducted this work in. A more specific group of people that I want to give a big ’thank you’ is my supervisors. First things first: Maja, you have been a source of never fading support and inspiration from the moment I walked into your office to ask for the possibility of doing a PhD at CBS. I bet that few docoral students have a main supervisior that is both perfect at guiding their work and kind enough to let them crach on their couch at BBQ nights. Thanks! Secondly, I want to thank my three aditional supervisiors for each giving the project a specific spin in the right direction. Anders Munk has been extremely important as a fellow companion with whom to enter the field of digital methods at a time where few other people in Copenhagen had an interest in it. Noortje Marres has been pivotal to the direction the dissertation ended up taking after she agreed to be supervisor about halfway through the project. I have never before had such a thougrough reading of my arguments and every supervision session was truly inspirational. Peter Kjær stepped in as a supervisior in the latter part of the project. The sessions we had concerning the organizational aspects of my dissertation were enlightning and refreshingy openmided regarding the boundaries of organizational analysis and the topics worth studying in this field. Besides my supervisiors there are a list of people who have in different ways played a role in the process towards getting the dissertation finished in time. When the project was still in its infancy I was in Amsterdam where both Anne Beaulieu and Richard Rogers were kind enough to give comments on my first ideas and their suggestions sat an important direction for the project. Thoughout the last three years I have also had two public ’work-in-progress’ seminars where Lars Kai Hansen, Torben Elgaard Jensen, Signe Vikkelsø and Paul du Gay agreed to serve as opponents. Thank you for doing that! And thank you Paul for working with me on projects outside this dissertation as well. Another thing that has contributed greatly to the dissertation work has been my visits abroad and I am truely grateful to those who made it possible. A big thank you to David Stark for inviting me to the Center on Organizational Innovation at Columbia University, where I spent the autumn 2011 indulging myself in thoughts about economic sociology. And once again thank you to Noortje Marres who invited me to Goldsmiths University, where I spent the spring of 2012 getting more aquainted with the field of digital methods. Also thanks to the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation for giving me the elite reserach grant that made these trips possible. Thanks should also be given to Nick Haagensen and Thosmas Basbøll for helping to make my english somwhat readable and, of course to Mikkel Flyverbom, Annamaria Carusi and Evelyn Ruppert for agreeing to be on the assement committee and for providing me with stimulating and constructive comments that will auguably improve my future work. Finally, an expression af gratitude that has nothing to do with academia as such. I am writing these acknowledgements on an S-train on the way back from Østerbro where I have just dragged my newborn son around the floor in a blanket to the tones of cheesy Danish 80´s ballads. That’s happiness! Thank you so much Karen for being the solid rock in my life when things get shaky and for giving birth to a little human being that puts the importance of evey single argument in the next 250 pages into a much larger perspective :-* Anders Koed Madsen, Copenhagen April 2013 English Summary In the late 1990s, Google pioneered the idea of scraping and repurposing digital traces as a new form of data with which to understand people’s preferences and behaviour. This way of generating empirical sensitivity towards the world can be termed digital methods and the last five years have seen such methods gain influence beyond the field of Internet search. Organizations of different kinds are increasingly mentioning the need to harness the intelligence of ‘big’ digital datasets, and the social sciences have similarly been marked by suggestions to move away from established methods such as surveys and focus groups, and learn from the way Google and other companies have succeeded in turning big datasets into knowledge of social dynamics. By enabling new combinations of data and software and by providing new ways of searching, aggregating, and cross-referencing empirical datasets, it seems probable that the spread of digital methods will re-configure the way organizations, social scientists, and citizens ‘see’ the world in which they live. This dissertation inquires into the epistemological and sociological characteristics of ‘web-based visualizations’, which is the most frequent outcome of the ambition to turn digital traces into useful depictions that organize the attention of their users. The empirical contribution of this dissertation consists of three papers, with each presenting an analysis of the construction and use of web-based visualizations in a distinct sphere of society. The first concerns the way organizations use web-based visualizations as a tool to scan their environment; the second concerns the way social scientists use them to understand the development of emerging technologies; and the third concerns the way the attention of the UK public is guided by such visualizations when searching for information about the issue of synthetic biology. These three papers are united by a common ambition to identify the actors and selection mechanisms that are involved in the construction of ‘web-based visualizations’ as well as to pinpoint the central challenges and trade-offs that emerge from the attempt to align these actors into simple depictions. The theoretical contribution of this dissertation is to use the empirical insights of the three papers to develop the concept of ‘web-visions’ and present it as a vocabulary through which one can theorize about web-based visualizations and suggest guidelines for their construction.
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