article on "the datafied web" in Internet Histories
May 18, 2026
An article on “the datafied web” that I co-authored has just been published in the Internet Histories journal.
The article builds on exchanges at the 6th RESAW conference on the “datafied web” last year. At the conference I gave one of the keynotes on Public Data Cultures alongside Nanna Bonde Thylstrup who gave a keynote on technographies of data loss. In the article Nanna and I are in conversation with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond and Ian Milligan.
We discuss the datafied web in relation to ad tech, deepfakes, AI slop, bots, leaks, trolls, bubbles, link rot, fintech, OSINT, data loss, software decay, venture capital, platform labour, web archives, DIY websites, surveillance architectures, payment systems, recommendation algorithms - as well as how to study, historicise and recompose these arrangements.
In my contributions I discuss four interrelated senses of the datafied web: from early web counters and quantification cultures, to databases as website backends, to networked webs of data (APIs, knowledge graphs, the semantic web), to the web as training data for AI.
In the exchange I focus on situating the datafied web and understanding how things got to where they are in order to feed imagination about how they might be organised differently, drawing inspiration from the work of artists, activists and collectives such as varia.zone, Systerserver, the School for Poetic Computation and the School of Machines.
Thanks again to Sebastian, Valérie and all involved in organising RESAW and the special issue for inviting me to be part of this. ✨
Bareikytė, M., Gerlitz, C., Giessmann, S., Gray, J. W. Y., Helmond, A., Milligan, I., Thylstrup, N. B., & Schafer, V. (2026). The datafied web: A round-doc discussion. Internet Histories, 0(0), 1–16. doi: 10.1080/24701475.2026.2671555
Following the 6th RESAW conference held at the University of Siegen in June 2025, we extended the conversation through follow-up discussions with selected participants, including both keynote speakers, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Jonathan W. Y. Gray. This round-doc discussion brings them into dialogue with Miglė Bareikytė, Carolin Gerlitz, Sebastian Giessmann, Anne Helmond, and Ian Milligan, creating a space for interdisciplinary exchange. It re-examines the notion of the datafied web by situating it historically and methodologically. By mobilizing insights from a range of fields, the discussion broadens the conceptual and methodological approaches and tools available for studying the datafied web.