Do you remember …
… the beginnings of early metrics in the 90s?
… the birth of web counters?
… those digital pioneers that marked and started to quantify the pulse of online activity?
… the novelty of seeing website visits measured in real-time?
… eye-catching graphics becoming the currency of online attention?
… the early days of companies like Webtrends, Urchin and DoubleClick?

I was invited to give a keynote talk at “the datafied web”, the 6th conference of the RESAW (Research Infrastructure for the Study of Archived Web Materials) community on 5-6th June 2025 at the University of Siegen. The event included 40 presentation from 70 researchers from 11 countries.

The first keynote was from Nanna Bonde Thylstrup who spoke about her research on technographies of data loss.

For the second keynote, I spoke about research for my forthcoming Public Data Cultures book - including how I used web archives to study practices and infrastructures of public data projects.

Here’s the abstract for my talk:

This talk explores how data is made public on the Internet amidst the rise of social media, platforms and AI. Retracing the emergence of legal and technical conventions of open data, it looks towards a more expansive understanding of public data cultures which shape how we know and live together. Through a series of empirical vignettes, the talk reconsiders data as cultural material, medium of participation and site of transnational coordination. It then turns to two forms of intervention: making data that is considered missing and entrypoints for critical data practice. As well as situating public data cultures in relation to the datafication and platformisation of the web, the talk will highlight the role of web archives in studying these developments.