OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Big Data & Society is 12. The table below lists those papers that are above that threshold based on CrossRef citation counts [max. 250 papers]. The publications cover those that have been published in the past four years, i.e., from 2021-12-01 to 2025-12-01.)

Article	Citations
Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere	144
Clicks and particulates: Value, alienation, and attunement as unifying themes in big data studies	135
Beyond artificial intelligence controversies: What are algorithms doing in the scientific literature?	107
Responding to unusual government request for user data: How tech companies make sense of human rights	95
Data citizenship: Quantifying structural racism in COVID-19 and beyond	89
The multifaceted and situated data center imaginary of Dutch Twitter	84
Supportive but apprehensive: Ambivalent attitudes towards a Danish public health AI and surveillance-driven project	70
Repairing the harm: Toward an algorithmic reparations approach to hate speech content moderation	67
Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly research	59
An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option	55
The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI	54
Is it about “them”? leveraging big data research to understand anti-immigrant discourse	49
Local government cultural economy data practices and futures: Capacity, decision-making and partnerships	46
‘Blockchain for good’: Exploring the notion of social good inside the blockchain scene	45
Undermining competition, undermining markets? Implications of Big Tech and digital personal data for competition policy	38
Review bombing the platformed city: Contested political speech in online local reviews	35
European artificial intelligence policy as digital single market making	33
Disability data and its situational and contextual irrationalities in the Global South	33
In Palantir we trust? Regulation of data analysis platforms in public security	32
Performative innovation: Data governance in China's fintech industries	32
How platforms govern: Social regulation in digital capitalism	32
Freezing out: Legacy media's shaping of AI as a cold controversy	31
Digital phenotyping and the (data) shadow of Alzheimer's disease	30
After visibility: Data as a factor of production in Douyin e-commerce	30
‘Data saves lives’: Ideational-material drivers of health data journeys in the UK	30

Sounding out voice biometrics: Comparing and contrasting how the state and the private sector determine identity through voice	30
Expansive and extractive networks of Web3	29
Justitia ex machina: The impact of an AI system on legal decision-making and discretionary authority	29
China as an analytical lens for AI and society	29
On samples, data, and their mobility in biobanking: How imagined travels help to relate samples and data	28
The importance of algorithm skills for informed Internet use	28
Producing shifting personhood: How designers anthropomorphize artificial intelligence	27
Simulation and the reality gap: Moments in a prehistory of synthetic data	27
Algorithms and hegemony in the workplace: Negotiating design and values in an Italian television platform	26
Mandatory age verification for pornography access: Why it can't and won't ‘save the children’	26
Computational reparations as generative justice: Decolonial transitions to unalienated circular value flow	26
Data and AI mystification: Ownership, control, and financialization in the platform	25
Anthropographics in COVID-19 simulations	24
From rules to examples: Machine learning's type of authority	24
Governing algorithmic decisions: The role of decision importance and governance on perceived legitimacy of algorithmic decisions	24
The Thick Machine: Anthropological AI between explanation and explication	23
The chat-chamber effect: Trusting the AI hallucination	23
Situating questions of data, power, and racial formation	23
Inequalities in privacy cynicism: An intersectional analysis of agency constraints	23
The ICE–Lexis nexus: An argument against use of commercial databases in immigration enforcement	23
In data we (don't) trust: The public adrift in data-driven public opinion models	22
Artificial intelligence and skills in the workplace: An integrative research agenda	22
With great (statistical) power comes great responsibility: A comment on the ethics of using administrative data to investigate marginalised populations	22
Outsourcing accountability: Extractive data practice and inequities of power in humanitarian third-party monitoring	22
Virtual state, where are you? A literature review, framework and agenda for failed digital transformation	21
After the algorithms: A study of meta-algorithmic judgments and diversity in the hiring process at a large multisite company	21
Researching data discomfort: The case of Statistics Norway’s quest for billing data	21
Bridging awareness and resistance: Using algorithmic knowledge against controversial content	21
Carceral algorithms and the history of control: An analysis of the Pennsylvania additive classification tool	21
Taking stock of COVID-19 health status certificates: Legal implications for data privacy and human rights	20
Bridging silos or adding friction? The data work behind re-identification across interoperable data infrastructures	20
Algorithmic constructions of risk: Anticipating uncertain futures in child protection services	20
AI incidents and ‘networked trouble’: The case for a research agenda	19
Digital identity as platform-mediated surveillance	19
A typology of artificial intelligence data work	19
Dislocated accountabilities in the “AI supply chain”: Modularity and developers’ notions of responsibility	19
Rethinking use-restricted open-source licenses for regulating abuse of generative models	19
Why putting artificial intelligence ethics into practice is not enough: Towards a multi-level framework	19
Imaginaries of better administration: Renegotiating the relationship between citizens and digital public power	18
Dancing with anklets: Navigating digital rural governance with big data in China	18
Just public algorithms: Mapping public engagement with the use of algorithms in UK public services	18
Coloniality and frictions: Data-driven humanitarianism in North-Eastern Nigeria and South Sudan	18
The power and promise of transparency: Perspectives from citizens’ juries of pandemic health data sharing	18
Toward a sociology of machine learning explainability: Human–machine interaction in deep neural network-based automated trading	18
#TargetedAds, or memeing dataveillance on TikTok: How users comply, oppose, and imagine datafication practices	17
Towards a political economy of technical systems: The case of Google	17
Situating data relations in the datafied home: A methodological approach	17
Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 US election cycle	17
Political affiliation moderates subjective interpretations of COVID-19 graphs	17
Generating reality and silencing debate: Synthetic data as discursive device	17

Data communism: Constructing a national data ecosystem	16
Gender and the invisibility of care on Wikipedia	16
Reactionary sensemaking: Mapping the micropolitics of online oppositional subcultures	16
Nothing new under the sun: Medical professional maintenance in the face of artificial intelligence's disruption	16
Algorithmic configurations in caring arrangements	16
Recording the ethical provenance of data and automating data stewardship	16
Tradeoffs all the way down: Ethical abduction as a decision-making process for data-intensive technology development	15
Making relations: Re-imagining AI through crafted and embodied knowledge systems in Moana Oceania	15
“Governing the urban commons”: DLT, institutions, and citizens in perspective	15
Prediction as extraction of discretion	15
Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models	15
Assemblage theory, data systems and data ecosystems: The data assemblages of the Irish planning system	15
The role of mundane resistance in the spectacular failure of the smart home	15
The city as a license: Design, rights and civics in a blockchain society	15
Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem	15
Deeply embedded wages: Navigating digital payments in data work	14
Afrofuturist ambiguities: Inclusion and consolidation in South African digital finance	14
Artificial intelligence for development (AI4D): A contested notion	14
Formally comparing topic models and human-generated qualitative coding of physician mothers’ experiences of workplace discrimination	14
Engaging citizens in experiments with computational analysis of patient stories: From unwarranted reductions to meaningful insights	14
‘I’ve left enough data’: Relations between people and data and the production of surveillance	14
Collectivism and individualism political bias in large language models: A two-step approach	14
Seeing like a driver: How workers repair, resist, and reinforce the platform's algorithmic visions	13
Ground truth tracings (GTT): On the epistemic limits of machine learning	13
Trade-offs in AI assistant choice: Do consumers prioritize transparency and sustainability over AI assistant performance?	13
Platform sub-imperialism	13
“Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia	13
The effectiveness of embedded values analysis modules in Computer Science education: An empirical study	13
Why sovereignty matters for humanitarian data	13
Contextual integrity in Africa's plural-legal contexts: Fintech, privacy, and informational norms in Ghana	12
Politics of data reuse in machine learning systems: Theorizing reuse entanglements	12
Strong or thin digital democracy? The democratic implications of Taiwan's open government data policy in the 2010s	12
The promises and challenges of addressing artificial intelligence with human rights	12
Erratum to Taking a critical look at the critical turn in data science: From “data feminism” to transnational feminist data science	12
Governing teachers through datafication: Physical–virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability	12
Repair and redress: A research program for algorithmic futures	12
Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society	12
Participatory action research in critical data studies: Interrogating AI from a South–North approach	12