Over the few short decades since the birth of the internet, our lives have become increasingly digitised. Estimates now suggest that adults in the UK may spend an average of 76% of their waking lives connected to the net in some fashion. Given this context, it is no surprise that many of the most important questions about society concern our digital lives and not our physical ones. These questions range from the nature of technological addictions, to the impacts of algorithmic biases and echo chambers on large-scale social and political processes.
However, a series of logistical barriers have prevented researcher access to large-scale digital behavioural data. Instead, the community has been forced to rely on self-report of digital behaviour, which bears risks relating to validity and reliability. In order to resolve these data access issues, UKRI have commissioned a new piece of research infrastructure, the Smart Data Donation Service (SDDS) via their SDR UK infrastructure programme. The SDDS holds the remit to acquire and steward digital trace data via a data donation methodology. We aim to both generate novel data assets, and fuse digital trace data to large pre-existing national data assets. We also hold the capacity to open this data to the research community in secure and privacy-preserving ways. Our goal is the normalisation of digital trace data in the measurement of digital phenomena across a range of domains. In this presentation I will present our strategy for doing so.
Presented by:
Dr David Zendle, University of York
Date & time:
May 21, 2025 12:30 pm - May 21, 2025 1:30 pm
Venue:
2N2.4.16
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