OOIR: Observatory of International Research

Papers

(The TQCC of Big Data & Society is 10. 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 2021-08-01 to 2025-08-01.)

Article	Citations
Beyond artificial intelligence controversies: What are algorithms doing in the scientific literature?	114
The multifaceted and situated data center imaginary of Dutch Twitter	106
Organizing an “organizationless” protest campaign in the WeChatsphere	79
Clicks and particulates: Value, alienation, and attunement as unifying themes in big data studies	77
Data citizenship: Quantifying structural racism in COVID-19 and beyond	62
Repairing the harm: Toward an algorithmic reparations approach to hate speech content moderation	60
Responding to unusual government request for user data: How tech companies make sense of human rights	50
An alternative planetary future? Digital sovereignty frameworks and the decolonial option	47
Undermining competition, undermining markets? Implications of Big Tech and digital personal data for competition policy	46
The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI	46
How platforms govern: Social regulation in digital capitalism	42
Is it about “them”? leveraging big data research to understand anti-immigrant discourse	37
Review bombing the platformed city: Contested political speech in online local reviews	34
‘Blockchain for good’: Exploring the notion of social good inside the blockchain scene	33
Local government cultural economy data practices and futures: Capacity, decision-making and partnerships	32
Disability data and its situational and contextual irrationalities in the Global South	31
In Palantir we trust? Regulation of data analysis platforms in public security	31
Performative innovation: Data governance in China's fintech industries	28
European artificial intelligence policy as digital single market making	28
Freezing out: Legacy media's shaping of AI as a cold controversy	28
On samples, data, and their mobility in biobanking: How imagined travels help to relate samples and data	27
Expansive and extractive networks of Web3	27
Digital phenotyping and the (data) shadow of Alzheimer's disease	26
‘Data saves lives’: Ideational-material drivers of health data journeys in the UK	26
Mandatory age verification for pornography access: Why it can't and won't ‘save the children’	24

The importance of algorithm skills for informed Internet use	24
Justitia ex machina: The impact of an AI system on legal decision-making and discretionary authority	24
Algorithms and hegemony in the workplace: Negotiating design and values in an Italian television platform	24
Simulation and the reality gap: Moments in a prehistory of synthetic data	23
Sounding out voice biometrics: Comparing and contrasting how the state and the private sector determine identity through voice	23
After visibility: Data as a factor of production in Douyin e-commerce	23
Computational reparations as generative justice: Decolonial transitions to unalienated circular value flow	22
From rules to examples: Machine learning's type of authority	21
Data and AI mystification: Ownership, control, and financialization in the platform	21
Anthropographics in COVID-19 simulations	21
Artificial intelligence and skills in the workplace: An integrative research agenda	20
Situating questions of data, power, and racial formation	20
The Thick Machine: Anthropological AI between explanation and explication	20
Governing algorithmic decisions: The role of decision importance and governance on perceived legitimacy of algorithmic decisions	20
The chat-chamber effect: Trusting the AI hallucination	20
Inequalities in privacy cynicism: An intersectional analysis of agency constraints	20
Carceral algorithms and the history of control: An analysis of the Pennsylvania additive classification tool	19
Digital identity as platform-mediated surveillance	19
Researching data discomfort: The case of Statistics Norway’s quest for billing data	18
Virtual state, where are you? A literature review, framework and agenda for failed digital transformation	18
Taking stock of COVID-19 health status certificates: Legal implications for data privacy and human rights	18
After the algorithms: A study of meta-algorithmic judgments and diversity in the hiring process at a large multisite company	18
Outsourcing accountability: Extractive data practice and inequities of power in humanitarian third-party monitoring	17
Bridging awareness and resistance: Using algorithmic knowledge against controversial content	17
Algorithmic constructions of risk: Anticipating uncertain futures in child protection services	17
In data we (don't) trust: The public adrift in data-driven public opinion models	17
With great (statistical) power comes great responsibility: A comment on the ethics of using administrative data to investigate marginalised populations	17
Dislocated accountabilities in the “AI supply chain”: Modularity and developers’ notions of responsibility	17
Why putting artificial intelligence ethics into practice is not enough: Towards a multi-level framework	17
Toward a sociology of machine learning explainability: Human–machine interaction in deep neural network-based automated trading	16
Just public algorithms: Mapping public engagement with the use of algorithms in UK public services	16
Manipulative tactics are the norm in political emails: Evidence from 300K emails from the 2020 US election cycle	16
A typology of artificial intelligence data work	16
AI incidents and ‘networked trouble’: The case for a research agenda	16
Rethinking use-restricted open-source licenses for regulating abuse of generative models	15
Imaginaries of better administration: Renegotiating the relationship between citizens and digital public power	15
The power and promise of transparency: Perspectives from citizens’ juries of pandemic health data sharing	15
Coloniality and frictions: Data-driven humanitarianism in North-Eastern Nigeria and South Sudan	15
Generating reality and silencing debate: Synthetic data as discursive device	15
Political affiliation moderates subjective interpretations of COVID-19 graphs	14
Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem	14
Reactionary sensemaking: Mapping the micropolitics of online oppositional subcultures	14
Data communism: Constructing a national data ecosystem	14
Towards a political economy of technical systems: The case of Google	14
Situating data relations in the datafied home: A methodological approach	14
Algorithmic configurations in caring arrangements	13
Deeply embedded wages: Navigating digital payments in data work	13
Making relations: Re-imagining AI through crafted and embodied knowledge systems in Moana Oceania	13
Prediction as extraction of discretion	13
Recording the ethical provenance of data and automating data stewardship	13

The city as a license: Design, rights and civics in a blockchain society	13
Nothing new under the sun: Medical professional maintenance in the face of artificial intelligence's disruption	13
Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models	13
Gender and the invisibility of care on Wikipedia	13
Tradeoffs all the way down: Ethical abduction as a decision-making process for data-intensive technology development	13
Assemblage theory, data systems and data ecosystems: The data assemblages of the Irish planning system	12
Artificial intelligence for development (AI4D): A contested notion	12
“Governing the urban commons”: DLT, institutions, and citizens in perspective	12
The role of mundane resistance in the spectacular failure of the smart home	12
Formally comparing topic models and human-generated qualitative coding of physician mothers’ experiences of workplace discrimination	12
Trade-offs in AI assistant choice: Do consumers prioritize transparency and sustainability over AI assistant performance?	12
Platform sub-imperialism	11
Collectivism and individualism political bias in large language models: A two-step approach	11
Afrofuturist ambiguities: Inclusion and consolidation in South African digital finance	11
Participatory action research in critical data studies: Interrogating AI from a South–North approach	11
Engaging citizens in experiments with computational analysis of patient stories: From unwarranted reductions to meaningful insights	11
‘I’ve left enough data’: Relations between people and data and the production of surveillance	11
Strong or thin digital democracy? The democratic implications of Taiwan's open government data policy in the 2010s	11
“Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia	11
Seeing like a driver: How workers repair, resist, and reinforce the platform's algorithmic visions	11
The effectiveness of embedded values analysis modules in Computer Science education: An empirical study	11
Ground truth tracings (GTT): On the epistemic limits of machine learning	11
Fact signalling and fact nostalgia in the data-driven society	10
The problem of researching a recursive society: Algorithms, data coils and the looping of the social	10
Politics of data reuse in machine learning systems: Theorizing reuse entanglements	10
Why sovereignty matters for humanitarian data	10
In search of the citizen in the datafication of public administration	10
Contextual integrity in Africa's plural-legal contexts: Fintech, privacy, and informational norms in Ghana	10
The promises and challenges of addressing artificial intelligence with human rights	10
Governing teachers through datafication: Physical–virtual hybridity and language interoperability in teacher accountability	10
Sharenting and social media properties: Exploring vicarious data harms and sociotechnical mitigations	10