Media of Cooperation

The CRC 1187 Media of Cooperation is an interdisciplinary collaborative research centre consisting of 19 subprojects and more than 60 researchers from media studies, ethnology, sociology, computer science, linguistics, ubiquitous computing, science and technology studies, education, law and engineering. The research centre studies digital data-intensive media, which have emerged as cooperative tools, platforms and infrastructures on a broad front and have brought new challenges and potential dangers in the context of ubiquitous data processing of sensor technologies and semi-autonomously operating artificial intelligence. In this field of tension, the CRC conducts basic digital research that mediates between past and present and shapes future digital media.

At the CRC, the INF sub-project, “Infrastructures for Collaborative Sensory FDM Practices”, focuses on infrastructural research data management (RDM) solutions for praxeological research practice. This includes providing discipline-independent basic infrastructures, processes, and services for long-term archiving; modules, concepts, and tools for collaborative FDM workflows; specializing in sensor data and sensory practices; and teaching data protection skills.

The INF project further develops and maintains basic data infrastructures in close coordination with the IT infrastructures that already exist at the ZIMT. During development, special attention is paid to the legal and ethical guidelines, fundamentals of information security, data protection, and FAIR data principles because these areas play a critical role in sensory data practices. In addition, together with the sub-projects, the role machine learning methods can play in collecting and especially analyzing the research data collected will be explored. At the same time, the metadata interface is continuously updated and expanded to offer the created metadata description as comprehensive as possible, using a set of all data formats. Furthermore, interfaces are developed and evaluated to integrate external software systems via secure interfaces. This is achieved through a participatory, practice-based approach together with the communities of practice established in the SFB 1187. The INF project documents and reflects the research-based appropriation practices and cooperatively constituting research infrastructures and their methods.