Schedule and location

Location: Tietotalo, Korkeakoulunkatu 1, 33720 Tampere (Room details to be updated 
later)

May 13, 2027, 9.00-16.30
May 14, 2027, 9.00-16.30

Registration 

Registration opens at the beginning of March 2027.

Speakers

Assistant Professor Marta Stelmaszak, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Organizer

Professor Hongxiu Li, Tampere University

Overview

What does it mean to study digital data? As data have become deeply entangled with 
organizations, digital technologies, and AI, a growing body of scholarship has begun to 
treat their production, management, and consequences as phenomena requiring 
explanation in their own right. Yet developing research around data poses distinctive 
challenges. What makes a phenomenon genuinely about data? Which theoretical 
perspectives help us see something new about it? And how can an interesting observation 
about data become a compelling contribution?

This two-day doctoral workshop explores theorizing digital data through the craft of 
developing research. The workshop asks how scholars identify, theorize, and write about 
data as a research object. Together, we will map different traditions of data research 
within and beyond information systems, examine the theoretical and methodological 
choices available to data scholars, and consider the different kinds of contributions that 
research on data can make.

A central emphasis of the workshop is on how data studies papers work and how they 
become publishable papers. We will dissect published research to identify the elements 
of a compelling data argument, follow the development of a paper to see how its framing 
and contribution evolved, and conduct an in-depth discussion of one article to understand 
how its argument is constructed. Participants will then use these insights to interrogate 
and develop their own projects through collaborative workshop exercises.

The workshop moves from individual papers toward the broader question of what it 
means to develop as a data scholar. Participants will reflect on the questions about data 
that they find intellectually compelling, how their projects might accumulate into a 
coherent research trajectory, and where they might position themselves within an 
expanding interdisciplinary community of scholars concerned with data.
The workshop is designed primarily for doctoral researchers in information systems and 
related fields. No particular method background or existing data studies project is 
required. The emphasis throughout is on collective inquiry, close reading, conceptual
development, scholarly argumentation, and learning how to turn curiosity about data into 
a sustained program of research.

Credit points