About the Center for Tracking & Society

Center for Tracking and Society (CTS) establishes an interdisciplinary research environment for empirical and theoretical research about digital tracking and society.

CTS establishes an interdisciplinary research environment for empirical and theoretical research into tracking and society, and for the development of digital, data-driven methods as a core element in humanistic and social-scientific research about human communication and culture.

CTS will serve as a hub for consolidating collaborations and knowledge exchange with other research units and with societal stakeholders about the operational logics, ideological underpinnings and social implications of digital tracking.

Our research spans

1. Institutional studies of tracking: We study the economic background and dynamics of the so-called data industry, the interplay between tracking and democratic institutions (news media), and its relations to sectors of the welfare society (health and education),
2. People-centered studies of tracking: We study the embedding of tracking and datafication in the everyday activities of individual citizens, including what it means to be a datafied human in terms of identity, privacy, critical data literacy as well as data-based bias and discrimination.
3. Methodological development for the empirical study of tracking: We develop and embed machine learning applications, software to resist tracking, and scraping techniques to automate the collection of data in research about digital systems and communication.
4. Theoretical perspectives on tracking: We cross-pollinate concepts and ideas from humanistic, social science and computer science to push our understanding of tracking in society, including the data-political and research ethical questions arising with tracking.