I am motivated by creating outstanding learning opportunities for our students, and to watch them embark on amazing careers. The collaboration with colleagues from different disciplines and with practitioners in the field is absolutely inspiring. But most importantly, I do not want to merely investigate and describe digital society, but actively take part in building it. Doing this together with the fantastic team at Utrecht Data School is priceless.
At Utrecht Data School we joke sometimes by saying: Get your hands dirty!! Impact is not merely about citation scores and publications in top journals, it is also very much about co-shaping our datafied society through supporting responsible data practices and investigating public debates. But this requires first one to immerse into and then to engage in the field. We do not simply preach in lecture halls.
With our team we investigate how datafication and algorithmisation shape citizenship and affect democracy. Our research usually takes place where the use of “big data” and AI can impact citizens: at (local) government organisations, public media institutions, and in public space. This provides us with many opportunities to witness how these organizations grapple with data ethics and to develop applicable solutions to the problems encountered by our partners. Impact manifests in the application of our findings, effective knowledge transfer, and successful interventions in the societal sectors where our action research takes place. Moreover, these collaborations enable us to research data practices and discourses within these sectors - valuable knowledge we can feed -back into academia.
The projects are very interdisciplinary and often require expertise from computer sciences, media studies, organisation studies, ethics, and law. And our teams frequently work together with practitioners and professionals from outside the university. In one of our projects, we are developing an audit for algorithmic systems, in cooperation with two Dutch safety and regulation authorities. Inspired by appraisal interviews for employees, we are creating a process that critically interrogates algorithms with an eye to the socio-cultural context of development and use. If we succeed and deliver a feasible process, it might be implemented across several sectors.
Last year, we developed - together with law professor Janneke Gerards - the Fundamental Rights and Algorithms Impact Assessment (FRAIA) which was commissioned by the Ministry for the Interior and Kingdom Relations. But of course, an impact assessment is only useful if it is actually used. So, we set up a train-the-trainer programme to teach government employees how to implement it. In April, a majority of the Dutch parliament motioned to make this impact assessment mandatory for the entire public management sector in the Netherlands.
But our research into social media dynamics shows impact on other and different levels. Working closely together with the Dutch weekly De Groene Amsterdammer (you might call it The New Yorker of the Netherlands), journalists and data researchers published a number of articles. The publication about online misogyny affected the public debate on hate speech against female politicians. The team of data researchers (Joris Veerbeek and Sarah Mohamed) and journalists (Coen van de Ven and Karlijn Saris) just won the prestigious Dutch journalism award De Tegel.
Of course, there are a number of practical challenges. The necessary administrative infrastructure for third revenue stream funded, and impact-driven research is often underdeveloped. Think of legal support, project management, interfacing with extra-university partners, the inadequate and dated division of support and research staff, the difficulty of creating dynamic teams across departments and faculties, and so on. With regard to much needed interdisciplinary teaching, the administrative system has proven highly inflexible in the allocation of hours across departments and faculties, dissuading such co-teaching.
But I consider the missing incentives the biggest challenge for creating effective knowledge transfer between academia and societal sectors. So far, the two main indicators for academic success are the peer-reviewed publication and the research grant. Both emphasize the individual accomplishment rather than the team effort, and both are largely focused on inside discourses of a distinct discipline. This makes it often difficult for colleagues to develop research projects with an eye to knowledge transfer and societal impact. It might also stifle teamwork. In our experience, teamwork is essential when it comes to interdisciplinary projects and collaboration with external partners.
Initiatives such as Recognition and Rewards will hopefully make a difference and change the incentives in academia. Then, more scholars will be rewarded for what is now invisible and unrecognized labour but which has tremendous value for education and research.
