Data loss: the politics of disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies

ongoing

The objective of Data Loss: the politics of disappearance, destruction, dispossession in digital societies (DALOSS) is to empirically demonstrate data loss as an integral dynamic within the current turn to digitization and big data, with deep-seated societal and political implications for the ongoing development of digital information ecologies. DALOSS examines data loss across three archival regimes – the internet, European bureaucracies, and social media platforms. It provides the first systematic study of data loss, offering novel and important insights for the future of European data politics. This project employs an original methodology combining ethnographic and digital methods, including digital forensics, counter-archiving and linkrot scoping. On this basis, DALOSS pioneers a new interdisciplinary approach, which brings together different tracks of theory within Critical Data Studies and Critical Archival Studies. This approach enables distinct but mutually interconnected dynamics of data loss – disappearance, destruction and dispossession – to be studied within a common analytical-theoretical framework. The analysis will offer unique insights into data loss as part of ongoing digitization and datafication processes, and the political, social and infrastructural implications of this phenomenon. The breakthrough potential of DALOSS is two-fold. By shifting the focus in big data discourses from accumulation to loss, this project establishes an entirely new and societally important research agenda of general relevance to scholars working on big data within the humanities and social sciences. Second, by situating data loss within the broader intellectual histories of loss and technology, the project develops a theoretical apparatus for understanding data loss not merely as technical challenges, but also as a fundamental cultural and political condition.