Anne Helmond is Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society at Utrecht University. Together with with Prof. José van Dijck, she co-directs the focus area ‘Governing the Digital Society,’ which investigates the societal impact and the governance of digital technologies. Her research places particular emphasis on platformization: the expansion of platforms across the web, the mobile ecosystem, AI technologies, and various societal domains. She examines the material and programmable data infrastructures that underpin and shape this process of platform expansion.

Her broader research focuses on developing methods for empirically and historically studying platformization, the politics and governance of platforms, how platform power is operationalized in practice, and the rise of AI as a platformized infrastructure. She also contributes to advancing digital methods to investigate how apps and app stores mediate sociocultural practices and issues, and the political economy of mobile data flows.

She is a long-standing member of two major international research collectives: the Digital Methods Initiative (2007–) and the App Studies Initiative (2017–), where she works on developing methodological approaches to the study of the historical and infrastructural dimensions of social media platforms and mobile applications. Her research interests span digital methods, software studies, platform studies, app studies, critical data studies, and web history.

In her dissertation ‘The web as platform: Data flows in social media‘ (2015) and her influential article 'The Platformization of the Web' (2015), Anne introduced the concept of “platformization” to conceptualize the rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the web and its expansion and integration into other websites, apps, and industries. Her dissertation received an honorable mention in the AoIR 2016 Best Dissertation Award for standing “to make a significant long-term impact in the field”.

Her work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Social Media + Society, Internet Histories, First Monday, and Computational Culture.

She currently supervises several PhD projects on the evolution of automation practices, platform governance, and the role of AI in education.

Open Science and Data sets

Anne has a strong commitment to collaborative work and team science, as well as open science by publishing open access and making data sets available. The Open Science Framework hosts a number of co-authored data sets, including:

• A dataset with information about the entire cloud offerings of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that comprise the ‘cloud AI ecosystem.’
  • DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/UNVC2.
  • Used to examine the partnerships, acquisitions, investments, and cloud infrastructures of “Big AI” (2024).
• A dataset with historical information about Facebook’s Graph API Reference, derived from archived web sources available in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
  • DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/WFXYP.
  • Used to examine API governance (2022).
• A dataset with information about the partnerships of the 20 most-used social media platforms and apps and the data intermediaries connected to them, derived from their own (public) partner programmes and directories.
  • DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/EKUM8.
  • Used to examine platform power and data partnerships in the digital advertising ecosystem (2021).
• A dataset provides information about all the apps that are part of the [COVID-19]-related Android (Google Play) and iOS (App Store) app ecosystems.
  • DOI: 10.17605/OSF.IO/WQ3DR.
  • Used to examine pandemic platform governance and the COVID-19 app ecosystem (2021).

Grants and Awards

• 2021: Collaborative Research Centre “Transformations of the Popular”.
  • German Research Foundation (DFG). Co-PI, with Johannes Paßmann, University of Siegen. Sub-project: “A Historical Technography of Online Commenting” (2021–2024). 
• 2020: WODC-onderzoek: Webharvesting door culturele erfgoedinstellingen.
  • Offerte Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek- en Documentatiecentrum (WODC), ministerie van Justitie en Veiligheid. Martin Senftleben, Joris van Hoboken, Jef Ausloos, Stef van Gompel, João Quintais (Instituut voor Informatierecht, UvA), Anne Helmond (Mediastudies, UvA).
• 2020: ESRC COVID-19 Rapid Response Grant.
  • Michael Dieter, Anne Helmond, Nathaniel Tkacz, Esther Weltevrede, Fernando N. van der Vlist, Jason Chao. Project: “COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies”.
• 2019: Working Groups Grant.
  • Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany. Markus Burkhardt, Anne Helmond, Tatjana Seitz and Fernando N. van der Vlist. Project: “Data sharing troubles: Tracing the evolution of Facebook’s Graph API.”
• 2017: NWO Veni Grant.
  • Innovational Research Incentives Scheme Veni, The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Project: “App ecosystems: A critical history of apps” (2017–2021). In this project Anne developed novel digital methods for writing app histories on three interrelated levels – individual apps, app stores, and platforms – to understand the emergence of this new cultural form.
• 2017: Cutting Edge Research Fund, Network Grant – Initiate.
  • Sustainable Humanities Programme. Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research (AIHR), University of Amsterdam. Project: “App Studies Initiative: An International Network for Advancing Research into Mobile Apps” (2017).
• 2016: The Association of Internet Researchers
  • Best Dissertation Award. Honorary mention.

Previous positions

• 2015–2022: Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
• 2021–2022: Principal Investigator of the project “Historische Technografie des Online-Kommentars” within the DFG funded SFB 1472 “Transformationen des Populären” at the University of Siegen, Germany.
  • Currently (2022–) Anne is an affiliated researcher examining the history of online commenting systems and practices with SFB 1472.
• Spring 2019: Comenius Professor of Digital Methods and Web History at the University of Siegen, Germany.