Digital data donations: A quest for best practices

Googling Referendum Campaigns: Analyzing Online Search Patterns Regarding Swiss Direct-Democratic Votes

“…Therefore, our findings should be interpreted with caution and cannot be generalized. Since we conducted our study, scholarly discussions about best practices of data donations and how to increase participation rates have intensified, and future studies should incorporate these novel insights into their design to obtain larger samples (Ohme & Araujo, 2022;van Driel et al, 2022). Second, the sample is not representative of the Swiss voting population and asking participants for data donations may introduce some selfselection bias.…”

ChatDashboard: A Framework to collect, link, and process donated WhatsApp Chat Log Data

“…These data can be requested by users, and donated directly to researchers. Such data donations ensure that research participants consent to their data being used, ensure transparency about the content of donated data, and make the research process more independent from restrictions and regulations of large platform providers (see Boeschoten et al, 2020 ; Ohme et al, 2020 ; Ohme & Araujo, 2022 ; and Breuer et al, 2022 for an in depth discussion). However, working with instant messenger data is a tedious process due to the many practical challenges with respect to incentivizing participants, collecting data, preprocessing it, ensuring informed consent, anonymization, and high heterogeneity of data (see also Kohne et al, 2022 ).…”

“…The goal of the ChatDashboard framework is to make donated WhatsApp chat logs as accessible as possible for ethically reflected social science research. To achieve this goal, the process of collecting, processing, anonymizing, linking, and analyzing donated WhatsApp chat logs must be as easy and convenient as possible for participants and researchers alike, while still being transparent and secure, and giving participants as much control over their data as possible (see also Ohme & Araujo, 2022 ). In addition, the donated data should be processed in such a way that they are easily usable for social scientists using their regular tools and software for data processing and analysis.…”

Spotivey: A web application for simplified use of the Spotify application programming interface in online questionnaire studies

“…Acquired data can then be augmented with metadata and content descriptors from other databases, leveraging the international standard recording code (ISRC) for music track identification. Similar ideas have been proposed and employed by Sanfilippo et al (2020) and Kwak et al (2020). However, this approach normally requires programming skills, and the connection between usage data and personal information raises data privacy concerns.…”

“…The growing prevalence of music streaming in everyday music consumption (Hess & Müller, 2022) and the availability of open application programming interfaces (APIs) present opportunities to overcome these challenges: Whenever an individual is using, for example, Spotify for everyday music consumption, digital traces of listening behavior are generated. Open APIs provided by the streaming platform can be utilized to access these, contingent upon individuals' informed consent (Ohme & Araujo, 2022). Acquired data can then be augmented with metadata and content descriptors from other databases, leveraging the international standard recording code (ISRC) for music track identification.…”