Mirko is co-founder and Faculty of Science lead of the Data School. He is a member of the steering committee at the reasearch area Governing the Digital Society and a member of the research area Applied Data Science. Mirko is a Visiting Professor at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences & Humanities of the University of Helsinki.
His research interest revolves around the socio- political impact of media technology. His publications cover user participation in cultural production, datafication, politics of software design and communication in social media. He is co-editor and co-author of the volume Digital Material. Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology (Amsterdam University Press, 2009). His book Bastard Culture! How User participation Transforms Cultural Production (Amsterdam University Press 2011) was listed as best-seller in the section computer science by The Library Journal. His most recent book publication is the edited volume (together with Karin van Es) The Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data (Amsterdam University Press 2017).
From 2012 to 2013 he was a research fellow at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2014 he was appointed post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Humanities at Utrecht University. In 2016 Mirko was a Mercator Research Fellow at the NRW School of Governance at University of Duisburg-Essen.