DATAGOV is a mixed-methods project. It combines qualitative and participatory research to study regulatory data infrastructure where they are made, contested, and lived. This means investigating policy arenas, technical systems, and in everyday life.
The qualitative methods are used to trace how these infrastructures are built and justified. Some of the qualitative methods used are:
- Policy analysis for multi-actor systems. This method will be used mainly as an entry point into fieldwork, learning about context. We will follow how proposals, regulation, and public discourse take shape in the various contexts (e.g. the EU Digital Identity Wallet, Brazil’s draft AI law).
- Semi-structured interviews with developers, policymakers, vendors, industry lobbyists, and digital rights advocates.
- Infrastructure ethnography, complemented by critical technocultural discourse analysis, to study these systems as boundary objects and surface the design logics written into them.
- Participatory methods, the project’s methodological innovation comes in how we bring in the people. The public is usually sidelined in research on datafication, our goal is to assure they are central to our research and we do this by employing methods like:
- A Living Lab, explained further here, it is a space to develop and test new participatory formats.
- Playable citizen science. This involves role-play board games and infrastructure walks that let participants experience automated decision-making first-hand and encounter infrastructure in their own surroundings.
- Co-design policy workshops that welcomes the public to share their perspectives into policy development.
- Democratic data governance ateliers built around three commissioned interactive artworks, one per case study, hosted in public libraries and other accessible spaces.
Blueprints for all participatory methods will be released open access for reuse by the wider research community.