Making sense of our connected world
Tackling COVID-19 as a Grand Challenge
Tackling COVID-19 requires coordinated, collaborative, and collective efforts that take into account other grand challenges including climate change. So how does this crisis relate to other grand challenges and how…
The Corona-Warn-App is less a technical problem than a communication problem
The much-cited “Corona-Warn-App” was critically discussed in advance in terms of data protection law and potential technical problems – but such problems are only there to be solved. The actual…
Getting Involved: Data science for good
An Interview with Johannes Müller by Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla and Claudia Haas In 2018, an interdisciplinary expert commission comprising nine professors started working on the Third Engagement Report, titled The Future…
Using Google Trends to track social responses to COVID-19
Countries with a high peak in Google searches for the term coronavirus tend to reduce their COVID-19 infection rates. Does it make sense to associate digital information search with the…
Open access: critical mass
Marcel Wrzesinski has been Open Access Officer at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society for almost a year. The seasoned journal editor who’s been in academic publishing for about…
An Unlikely Experiment
“We live in interesting times. As much as we may fear what lies ahead, looking away will not be the answer. There’s no time for looking back but there are…
How COVID-19 impacts digital technologies
The current lockdown is boosting online activity – everything is increasingly shifting to the digital sphere. In this dossier we ask if, how and why the Corona pandemic will affect key subjects of digital technologies. What does this mean for the regulation of content on digital platforms? How is Covid-19 activating the digital society? How does it transform our online culture? How safe are tracing apps? What lessons can be learned regarding cyber security? Busy times for our researchers!
How metaphors shape the digital society
Cloud, Big Data, Piracy, Virus are common terms in the debates about digital technologies. At the same time they are methaphors that originate from other fields than technology. What normative or political baggage do they therefore carry? How does this vocabulary shape the emerging digital society? In the series of articles on the How metaphors shape the digital society different authors analyse the assumptions and meanings of metaphors in the digital era.
