The DFG-funded research project Datenpolitiken auf der Spur (Tracing Data Politics) deals with (digital) data in the context of negotiations on a mobility transition in Frankfurt. The project is based at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology at Goethe University Frankfurt.
We examine the everyday and less everyday data practices of various actors and ask: What topics does data exist on? How and in what context does this data come into being? Who has access to what data and at what price? Which forms of mobility, neighbourhoods or realities of life are not or only rarely recorded in data? How does an imbalance in data influence the distribution of space in the city? How is data used in political debates? How is data used to imagine the future and in planning work?
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Ethnographically, we follow the ramified journeys of various transport data through space and time, from one context to another. We observe how the data itself and the interpretations of its readers change in the course of these journeys. In this way, we seek to understand how data politics (Ruppert et al., 2017) unfold in Frankfurt’s mobility transformation, because data is never „raw“ or neutral (Gitelman, 2013) but always exists in a political context from the outset and, in turn, shapes political decision-making.
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News from our Blog
- Data Walk | NEW EDITIONOn 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 …