Blog entry

DATAFIED – First Results presented at two Research Colloquia

In November 2020 and February 2021, Dr. Juliane Jarke and Irina Zakharova presented the first results from TP2 of the DATAFIED research project. They reflected first at the Colloquium Social Research of the University of Lucerne and then at the Research Colloquium of the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) on the methodological approaches to researching data flows in educational organizations.

At the heart of these methodological reflections is the further development of the approach of “data journeys” – data journeys already used in the sociology of science and the natural sciences (Bates et al., 2016; Leonelli 2014, 2020). For example, data journeys are used to track the movement of climate data from a meteorological sensor to global financial market institutions (Bates et al., 2016). The DATAFIED research team is examining the data that moves within schools and between schools and departments of education. The focus is on school management systems. In doing so, the concept of a data journey presents how data changes along the way, how paths of data open and close during the journey, and by what social and organizational conditions data movements are driven.

Both talks explored the data journeys approach and its benefits and challenges for educational research. The presentation slides of both talks can be found on the ifib website under publications. In the coming months, TP2 will continue to work on data journeys together with the other projects from the DATAFIED network. Thus, using the example of the researched federal states, it will be shown how school data, which originate e.g. in a school office room, move on and evolve to the education statistics of the federal states.