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At STS Hub 2025 in Berlin, which was held under the heading „Diffracting the Critical“, our project was represented with a contribution on the various forms of boundary work that civil society actors perform in connection with their data practices. The presentation dealt with the role of voluntary data work in negotiations on a transport transition. Activists in Frankfurt collect cycling and pedestrian traffic data to support their concerns with numerical evidence and are repeatedly confronted with discussions about data validity. Data itself becomes an object of boundary work and is at the same time a tool for collaboration and the renegotiation of boundaries and responsibilities.

The Politics of Voluntary Data Labor: Activist Boundary Work in Urban Mobility Transformation

Panel

Demarcating boundaries of and with data: Boundary work in the age of datafication

Author

Catharina Dietrich

Abstract

The demand for numerical evidence is becoming increasingly prominent in policy and administrative decision making and audible in public debates (Rieder and Simon, 2016). The field of urban mobility is no exception. In the heated debates over a sustainable traffic transition, experiential knowledge is often dismissed as unreliable.

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In my research on activist data practices in Frankfurt, Germany, I observed that civic actors engage in voluntary data labor to meet these demands. Activists collect and generate digital data on cycling and pedestrian traffic to underpin their claims. By employing measuring devices and counting practices, they reconfigure their sensory perceptions into numerical evidence. Their effort to produce knowledge that is seen as neutral and credible, and to frame it as “citizen science”, involves considerable boundary work. As the data they produce is often contested, they find themselves in ongoing negotiations about what counts as valid knowledge and what characterizes trustworthy data.

Which digital research tools can we use to enrich ethnographic methods? At the end of March, we held an introductory session on the network analysis tool Gephi, which was guided by this question. Gephi can be used to visualise tabular data sets as graphs. The programme is typically used to analyse large data sets, which are often collected automatically. In our workshop, together with Mace Ojala from Ruhr University Bochum, we considered whether and how Gephi can also be used effectively for qualitative research with ethnographic methods. Both students and researchers from the ‘Fixing Futures’ graduate college took part. A big advantage for everyone: the software is open source and therefore freely available.

The graph, Gephi’s central function, has the typical form of a network of nodes and connecting lines, known as ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’. Network semantics has become established in almost all areas of society over the last few decades: the metaphor of the network can be used to describe the relationships between discrete instances (e.g. individuals, organisations or objects). It thus offers a possible perspective on the world that has a long tradition in science and technology studies, for example in actor-network theory or in relational approaches. The research software Gephi was developed to enable the visual representation and computer-assisted analysis of networks on the basis of a database.

In our workshop, we first clarified some basic epistemological assumptions of network thinking in order to develop conditions for the meaningful use of Gephi and comparable tools for ethnographic research. These are characterised by the fact that they mostly examine practices and focus on the relationships and entanglements of their empirical objects. The metaphor of the network can help to recognise the connections between human and other entities in the field that arise through practice and in practice, to transfer them into a symmetrical scheme and thus make them accessible to scientific analysis. Guided by Mace Ojala, we were able to jointly explore this underlying logic of network analysis and consider which aspects of our various research projects we would like to digitally map in this way. We also discussed the difficulties of translating ethnographic material into the network logic of Gephi: observations from the field cannot always be transferred into the tabular form required for the creation of a graph. For example, the intensity or relevance of a contact can be visualised using numerical weightings or colour codes. However, many decisions must be made in advance, such as how intensity or relevance manifest themselves in the field and whether they can be quantified appropriately in all cases.

The introduction was therefore a good opportunity to look at the various STS research projects at Goethe University in Frankfurt with new methodological questions and to discuss the potential and obstacles of digital research tools. What we take away: Working with the Gephi software tool not only allows us to generate clear graphs, but also helps us become aware of our own scientific working methods and make implicit ethnographic assumptions explicit. A valuable practice for our projects!

On the Traces of Mobility Data: An Interactive Data Walk through Frankfurt

As part of the accompanying programme for the exhibition On the Move! Frankfurt and Mobility at the Frankfurt Historical Museum, we offered a public data walk in May. As this was very well received, we are repeating the offer again in autumn

25.10.2025 | 15:00 Uhr

Led by: Catharina Dietrich, Janine Hagemeister (Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt)

Registration: No prior registration is required.

Meeting point: We will meet at 3 p.m. in front of the main entrance of the Historical Museum (Saalhof 1, 60311 Frankfurt am Main).

Accessibility: The walk will cover a distance of approximately 3 km. Content will be presented both visually and verbally. However, we want to make the walk accessible to all participants. Please contact us in advance at datenpolitiken@uni-frankfurt.de so that we can take your needs into account and find a suitable solution together.

In case of bad weather: In the event of thunderstorms or heavy rain, we will meet in the foyer of the museum and hold a discussion there about the data landscape.

Description

Frankfurt is on the move – every day, hundreds of thousands of people travel around the city, along with goods and merchandise. As a designated ‘smart city’, Frankfurt is increasingly recording traffic volumes digitally: while data on car traffic is collected in real time, only isolated data patches exist for other modes of transport such as cycling and walking.

We would like to explore the city with you, following the trail of different mobility data.

Together, we will visit various measuring stations in public spaces. We will look at data available for specific locations and discuss our perceptions of street space and different perspectives on the city. In short presentations from our research project ‘Tracing Data Politics,’ we will talk about how digital traffic data is integrated into political contexts and recount the journeys that data takes from its creation to its use.

The event is open to the public and part of the programme of the Goethe University’s Citizens’ University

At the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam, Martina Klausner spoke on the panel ‘Voicing Places’ about the intertwining of data and politics. Her narrative ranged from the acoustic diversity of signals and noises in urban street space to the invisible and inaudible signals written and transmitted by induction loops, sensors and scanners. She explained why car data is omnipresent in Frankfurt’s data landscape, while data on other forms of mobility is only available to a very limited extent and is manually stitched together into data patches on an ad hoc basis. The presentation explored the question of how politics is inscribed in data assemblages and how these data ultimately express political meanings themselves.

Street noise: tracing data politics in urban traffic infrastructures

Panel

Voicing Places

Author

Martina Klausner

Abstract

In my contribution I seek to listen to the different signals that are generated as part of urban traffic and administrative information infrastructures and how the resulting data assemble voice politics in different forms.

Urban streets are filled with noise: roaring engines, chatting neighbours, bicycle bells, all voicing demands for their space in public place. Unheard and mostly unnoticed by road users, other signals fill the urban public space: inductors embedded in the asphalt of the road generate and transmit signals, indicating the numbers and movement of (some) road users and ultimately form the basis for the planning and monitoring of the city’s traffic. My contribution to the panel seeks to listen to these signals and asks how they participate in the politics of redistributing space for urban traffic. As part of the historically grown traffic and administrative information infrastructures, traffic data are assembled in particular ways.

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To no surprise, signals counting cars and controlling their flows and stops have been central for the development of traffic data infrastructures. Just as cars dominate the roads, traffic data infrastructures are also primarily populated by car data. However, my interest is less on the quantity of certain data but on the trails and forms that data take and how they assemble and voice political claims in different ways. While car data are meant to flow continuously, data on bicycle traffic are knit together in what I call data patches: context-specific and issue-related data collections that span various sources, times and places, enabling different data stories and politics.

In September 2024, as part of a research trip to Los Angeles, we organised the workshop „Missing, Underappreciated, Found“ together with Andrea Ballestero as part of the Ethnography Studio and discussed our research on the topic of „Maps and Models as Machine Ethnography“ with colleagues.

With the Ethnography Studio at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Andrea Ballestero and Katie Ulrich have created a forum that brings together ethnographers from various disciplines – from art and engineering to anthropology, computer science and sociology. Here, researchers experiment with new approaches to understanding complex social phenomena. A guiding principle is that the uncertainties and ambiguities of ethnographic research prove valuable for creative thinking. The studio embraces a diversity of methods and theoretical perspectives and values contradictions over coherence. Members develop their projects and research ideas in a collaborative space where they ask each other challenging questions.

„Missing, Underappreciated, Found“

The workshop “Missing, Underappreciated, Found” examined the transitional devices that ethnographers encounter or create themselves in their work to develop their research projects. The aim was to highlight the possibilities that these ethnographic tools (such as satellite maps, databases, quantitative models) open up when their use complements established ethnographic methods such as participant observation and interviews.

In addition to our project group, two other projects presented their ongoing research: Labyrinth (UCLA) and Expanding the Social World Downwards (USC).

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In our own article, entitled Maps and Models as Machine Ethnography, we examined how digital mapping and quantitative models as tools and objects of ethnographic research enable exciting perspectives and insights. We compared two objects: the new traffic model being developed by engineers in the city of Frankfurt and our own experimental mapping of the complex landscape of actors and data in the context of the mobility transition in Frankfurt, which we created using the digital graph visualisation software Gephi. In doing so, we showed how these digital models and maps are not representations of reality, but rather, in their reduction of complex interrelationships, are themselves world-shaping and actively shape and expand ethnographic research and its questions.

For the exhibition at the Historisches Museum „Bewegung! Frankfurt und die Mobilität“ (Movement! Frankfurt and Mobility), we collaborated with illustrator Jonas Gallenkamp to create a hidden object picture (Wimmelbild) that provides an overview of the mobility data landscape in Frankfurt. The busy scene is framed by an ethnographic comic that depicts the research project. In the exhibition catalogue, we wrote an accompanying article on the intertwining of data and politics and explained our approach to ethnographic research on data journeys.

When data goes travelling. An ethnographic search for clues in Frankfurt’s mobility data.

Authors

Martina Klausner, Catharina Dietrich, Janine Hagemeister

Citation

Klausner, M., Dietrich, C., Hagemeister J. (2024). Wenn Daten auf Reisen gehen. Eine ethnografische Spurensuche zu Frankfurts Mobilitätsdaten. In N. Gorgus, V. Asschenfeldt, I. Chhima, P. Henning, S. Roller, & S. Thimm (Hg.), Schriften des Historischen Museums Frankfurt: Band 45. Bewegung! Frankfurt und die Mobilität (Vol. 45, pp. 76—77). Frankfurt am Main: Societäts-Verlag.

At the Data Power Conference 2024, we discussed data work and power relations in a data-based transformation of urban mobility. Our presentation focused on the political significance of unequal data availability for different forms of mobility. While motorised private transport is comprehensively recorded, walking and cycling often remain invisible. It is often civil society actors who take the initiative on this issue and collect data themselves in order to bring their concerns into political decision-making processes

Data labor and power in the context of Verkehrswende politics in Frankfurt, Germany

Panel

(Inv)isibilities in environmental and spatial data

Author

Catharina Dietrich and Janine Hagemeister

Abstract

Municipal planning and monitoring practices increasingly deal with data-saturated urban environments, especially in the traffic sector: Here, data become a prevalent tool for contriving more climate-friendly ways of moving people and goods in the context of striving for quantified sustainability goals. Car-centered infrastructure is still dominant in most cities and inferring from STS scholarship, we assume that it has politics. Comprising not only what is visible on the roads — traffic lights, lanes, and intersections — traffic infrastructure also includes a growing invisible twin of counting points, induction loops and data-handling systems.  

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Our research on the Verkehrswende (“mobility turn”) politics in Frankfurt, Germany, observes that the municipality automatedly collects extensive data on motorized individual traffic, while for other forms of mobility, it relies on modest data patches of singular locuses. Within our two case studies on A) civic and B) administrative data politics we find, however, that for all types of traffic, fields of action exist in which the administration only acknowledges communicated concerns when they are quantified. In this context data gain substantial power, as the recognition or disregard of various realities hinges significantly upon the availability or absence of numerical data. To increase the discursive and political power of cyclists and pedestrians, and their space in the city, civil society organizations frequently collect data themselves, exerting significant unpaid labor. By creating new data stories, they render visible what was not on the screens before. 

We argue that the unequal datafication of different mobilities in combination with uniform expectations for data-informed arguments fosters power imbalances. It seems as if the horsepower of a road user corresponds with their overall power position — not only on the streets, but also in the digital data sheets.

During the EASST/4S conference in Amsterdam in 2024, we discussed data supply chains in the public sector. In our presentation, we showed that transport data does not simply flow, but moves along sometimes bumpy paths through a network of actors and exchange relationships. While city administrations, companies and citizens generate, use and share data, these processes do not always run smoothly. Using two case studies, we discussed how classic market mechanisms mix with informal exchange practices and what tensions this creates for urban transport policy.

Lighting Bumpy Data Roads: Investigating Heterogeneous Data Supply Chains in Urban Traffic Transformation

Panel

Demystifying Data Supply Chains: Perspectives from Markets of Data Sourcing, Production, and Brokerage

Authors

Catharina Dietrich and Janine Hagemeister

Abstract

Urban traffic infrastructure matters for a variety of actors: the municipal administration, private enterprises, and most numerously, citizens. Just as manifold as the relations between these actors are the traffic data they generate for different purposes at different locations, and the evolving supply chains.

This presentation is based on an ongoing research project on data politics in the proclaimed “sustainable traffic transformation” (Verkehrswende) of Frankfurt, Germany. We use the concept of data journeys (Bates et al. 2016) to trace how data is produced, processed, and shared within the complex networks at play.

Many actors obtain ambivalent roles in this entanglement: Citizens are simultaneously customers, objects of datafication, data consumers, or sometimes even data manufacturers, while the municipality acts as both a key data provider and a customer. In addition, relevant legal regulations and political interests contribute to a mixture of commodification logics and practices. As a public actor within private markets, the municipality finds itself in various double binds. 

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We will illustrate the diversity of data trading practices on two examples. While the data purchases involved in the development of a new municipal traffic model follow traditional logics of marketization, other constellations elude those. In the case of pedestrian counters that were installed in Frankfurt, the agreements are based on an exchange of various services and mutual data provision instead of monetary payments. Attending to those diverse forms of bargain allows us to investigate the multifaceted practices of data valorization involved along different stages of the supply chains.

On 18 April 2024, the Agency for Urban Change (Agentur des Städtischen Wandels) opened its doors and invited the people of Frankfurt to a discussion on mobility and participation in the city. The headline was: ‘How does knowledge get moving?’ This free and public event was organised in close cooperation with several research projects and institutions.

The organising team consisted of Martin Herrnstadt, head of the international research network “Global Cultures of Enquête: Towards a Praxeology of Surveying (17th – 21st Century)” at the Institute of History at the University of Bremen, Timotheus Kartmann with his research project “Das soziale Museum“ and Janine Hagemeister and Catharina Dietrich from the project „Tracing Data Politics“ . The aim was to bring together different positions and perspectives from experts in urban society, academia and administration and to initiate a dialogue between them.

Johanna Lanio from the Polytechnic Society kicked things off with a short presentation of the ‘Frankfurt Next Generation’ survey. This survey was aimed at users of digital platforms and was designed as a low-threshold participation opportunity. We then moderated a panel discussion in which the invited experts reported on their experiences with participation processes and knowledge production in the context of urban development.

Isabel Istel from the Umweltlernen in Frankfurt e.V. association provided exciting insights into the participation projects with children and young people that were part of the process of creating the Mobility Master Plan. The projects, in which schools in Frankfurt were involved, met with great approval both on the panel and among the audience. Several voices from the audience emphasised that such formats should be offered more frequently in order to give young people the opportunity to actively shape their city. Tobias Krauch presented the participation projects of the German Architecture Museum and the Agency for Urban Change and explained how real-world laboratories are used to initiate participation in various urban spaces and to test new forms of dialogue.

Nils Güttler supplemented these practical experience reports with a scientific classification. As a science historian at the University of Vienna, his research focuses on „counter-knowledge“ and participation, among other topics, and in the panel discussion he linked the findings from his historical research with current issues. He drew parallels to the protests against the expansion of Frankfurt Airport in the 1980s, during which citizens produced their own knowledge to challenge hegemonic structures. At the same time, he pointed out that the framework conditions for participation and its political significance have changed since then. Today, the integration of knowledge from urban society is much more self-evident.

During the discussion, it became clear that participation brings not only opportunities but also challenges. Sebastian Kotek from the Superblock Initiative in Bockenheim and Beatrix Baltabol from Radentscheid talked about what voluntary work can achieve and what support initiatives need. Stephan Böhm-Ott from the Department of Planning and Housing was also present as a representative of the city and enriched the discussion with his views on the possibilities and impossibilities of urban planning.

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Isabel Istel spoke about the difficulties that become particularly apparent when working with teenagers. She described how important it is for young people to experience democracy through participatory projects. However, she also addressed the frustration that arises when simple requests, such as the installation of a zebra crossing, take a long time to be implemented – often so long that by the time they are finally completed, the young people have long since changed schools. Several panel guests emphasised that participation projects should be made more visible in order to promote the exchange of different perspectives and achieve greater impact in the long term.

The vibrant audience discussion formed the centrepiece of the evening. Numerous visitors contributed their own experiences and enriched the debate with their perspectives. As the panel was not able to reflect the diversity of Frankfurt’s urban society, it was particularly important to us to give all voices plenty of space. We were delighted that a representative of the Frankfurter BehindertenArbeitsGemeinschaft (FBAG) was also present and used the public platform to voice his criticism of urban planning processes.

After the official part of the event, many guests stayed for a relaxed chat over drinks. In this relaxed atmosphere, numerous conversations developed and new contacts were made.

An exhibition was also set up in the room, visually presenting various aspects of the participation projects. Large posters showed the results of youth participation in the Mobility Master Plan and drafts of the Radentscheid initiative. The Superblock Bockenheim citizens’ initiative presented data that its members had collected in OpenStreetMap. This included maps of pavement widths and parking regulations, which had been meticulously recorded by the activists.

The evening was rich in insights and changes of perspective for us. The event not only brought together different actors, but also showed how much knowledge and commitment there is in urban society.

At the first conference of STSing e.V., which focused on the topic of „Leakage“, Martina Klausner spoke about how commercial data sets integrated into the City of Frankfurt’s systems sometimes allow market-based logic and traces of profit-oriented data collection practices to find their way into the data practices and data portals of the city administration. To do this, Martina Klausner drew on a relational understanding of the state as developed in state anthropological literature.

Data-based Governance and Partial Data Connections. Tracing Data Politics of and for a „Verkehrswende“

Panel

Digital Statecraft

Author

Martina Klausner

Abstract

The digitization of public administration and governance infrastructures is often framed as data-driven efforts to enhance more efficient and transparent ways of governing. While public administration could be considered a fertile ground for datafication due to its long history of data collection with regards to its territories and populations, in practice, datafying public administration turn out to be rather complex and at least not straightforward. In my contribution, I trace data practices within public administration and ask how and which data are generated/captured and how these data circulate or not. Doing so, my talk attempts to bring together STS approaches to the study of the state and politics with approaches in Critical Data Studies. The talk will draw from a case study on implementing Verkehrswendepolitik (politics for a mobility turn) in Frankfurt am Main and discuss what we can learn about politics by tracing and tracking such data, but also by the absences of certain data and hindrances to their journeys. This allows, I argue, to attend to data politics as both politics done with data, but also the inherent “politics of data.”

As part of the 44th DGEKW Congress entitled ‘Analyses of Everyday Life: Complexity, Economic Cycle, Crisis,’ Katrin Amelang and Martina Klausner organised a panel on the topic of ‘Everyday Data – Constellations and Dynamics of Everyday Data Practices.’ The panel discussed the current significance and self-evident nature of data and datafication processes. Four presentations used various empirical examples to highlight the different aspects of everyday data and everyday data practices, their policies and infrastructures. Our project was represented here with a presentation on data sharing practices.

Opening and sharing administrative data as a means of establishing partial connections

Panel

Everyday data – constellations and dynamics of everyday data practices

Author

Martina Klausner

Abstract

There are growing calls for public administration data relating to various areas of citizens’ lives to be made publicly accessible and shared with various interest groups. My presentation focuses on the everyday practices of this opening up and sharing, using the example of Frankfurt’s city administration, and discusses how historically grown information architectures, legally and politically defined responsibilities, and formal and informal work processes shape this opening up and sharing in everyday work. At the same time, this focus highlights the diverse everyday work required to connect data sets, at least partially, and allows us to think about working with data beyond this specific case.