Paper on the Dutch data center imaginary published in Big Data & Society

During my work as a research assistant at Utrecht Data School, one of our projects was on the building of data centers. It was a hot topic in the Netherlands at the time, as more and more of them were put in place, with protests from local municipalities about their water use and how they looked.

It was my first time working on a paper meant for publication, and I learned a lot: how to structure your research, how to solve problems along the way, and how to hold your expectations loosely so you stay flexible when something more interesting turns up.

In the paper we analysed how people on Dutch Twitter talked about data centers, and how different groups framed them according to their own alignment. My contributions were mostly in the data collection, classification and visualisation.

When we were finishing up, I remember looking for outlets that would fit and suggesting Big Data & Society, since it had the biggest impact factor. There was some hesitation at first, but we ended up shooting for the stars and luckily landing among them. Read the paper.