The board of the PDI- SSH Foundation honours applications in the Call Digital Infrastructure SSH

There has been a strong desire in the fields of social sciences and humanities (SSH) to assign part of the resources intended for the SSH Sector Plan of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW) to a domain wide digital SSH plan to support accessible, high-quality digital infrastructure facilities. Digital infrastructure plays an increasingly important role and in many cases is the foundation of leading research into the social and scientific issues of the digital society. This not only concerns infrastructure for collecting data, but also infrastructure for storing, publishing, analysing and linking data. In addition, these infrastructures require professional support, for example from data managers and infrastructure specialists. Researchers also have a growing need for digital support and expertise.
 
To meet those requirements, the Platform Digital Infrastructure SSH launched the second Call for Proposals Digital Infrastructure in the social science and humanities. PDI-SSH launched this call as part of the SSH Sector Plan. 
After a careful review process, following with the criteria as described in the Call for Proposals of the Platform Digital Infrastructure SSH, 10 of 47 applications were accepted. 
 
Daniel Oberski, Laura Boeschoten and Bella Struminskaya from the Methods and Statistics group are involved in one of these applications. It is the application about Digital Data Donation Infrastructure (D3I) of Dr. Theo Araujo from the University of Amsterdam. 

About Digital Data Donation Infrastructure (D3I)

Human behaviour can be studied in an unprecedented level of detail with the digital trace data that users create when using digital platforms. The Digital Data Donation Infrastructure (D3I) will enable individuals to donate their digital trace data to academic research in a secure, transparent, and privacy-protecting manner. It is based on individuals’ rights to download and port their data from any organization which stores user data, as per the General Data Protection Regulation (Article 15). This unlocks a treasure trove for research in the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
D3I turns the user-platform-researcher relationship around: Instead of researchers being dependent on platforms to study individuals, it enables researchers to work directly with individuals to study both individuals’ own behaviour and platforms themselves. This allows researchers to collect crucial data to study causes, contents, and consequences of (online) communication, behaviour and cultural production and consumption within platforms.
Built in a flexible and extensible manner, D3I will initially cover the most popular online (Facebook and Google, and their properties), entertainment (Netflix and Spotify) platforms, and work (Uber) platforms. Importantly, it will provide the legal and methodological framework necessary to help accelerate and expand critical SSH research across university and disciplinary boundaries.

Laura Boeschoten about the project: "Daniel and I have been working on a proof-of-concept of the framework and the software for the past year. We will now set this up on a much larger scale under Theo's supervision, while also integrating functionalities from other initiatives. I will mainly be working on adding new functionalities to the software and guiding projects that want to use the software, as well as implement methodological experiments here. Bella Struminskaya will be doing research to set up the workflow and software in such a way that it is intuitive for research participants, so that it is trustworthy and that it also gives them insight into their own donated data."

Find more about the other 9 applications on the Platform Digital Applications website.