[ecrea] Call for Abstracts -- Special Issue on Apps and Infrastructures

We invite submissions for a special issue of Computational Culture on 
"Apps and Infrastructures", edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, 
David Nieborg, and Fernando van der Vlist. Please find the call for 
abstracts below.

750 word abstracts are due by April 1, 2018. More information is 
available at http://computationalculture.net/cfps-events/ 
<http://computationalculture.net/cfps-events/>. Queries to the editors 
can be addressed at (apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com)>.

Best regards,

Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen)
Anne Helmond (University of Amsterdam)
David Nieborg (University of Toronto)
Fernando van der Vlist (University of Siegen and University of Amsterdam)

--

# CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
# APPS AND INFRASTRUCTURES

# A special issue of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies
# Edited by Carolin Gerlitz, Anne Helmond, David Nieborg, Fernando van 
der Vlist

## OUTLINE

Apps have become an important new cultural, technical, and economic 
software form. Most of today’s apps are designed to run on smartphones 
and other mobile devices and provide functions previously possible with 
other software forms (Morris and Elkins, 2015). However, they represent 
new ways in which software artefacts are developed, tested, packaged, 
promoted, distributed, monitored, monetised, downloaded, integrated, 
updated, stored, accessed, archived, interpreted, and used. To 
foreground the relational and material dimensions of apps, research 
should not only account for them as discrete media objects, but needs to 
approach apps as part of their multiple infrastructures and environments 
including app stores, development platforms, advertising technologies, 
analytics tools, and cloud services, among others.

App stores set the conditions for users and developers to distribute, 
browse, promote, monetise, rate, and download apps developed for Apple’s 
iOS, Google’s Android, or other mobile operating systems. Developers 
draw on a variety of both official and third-party developer tools, 
including developer pages and reference documentation, application 
programming interfaces (APIs), software development kits (SDKs), 
integrated development environments (IDEs), and dedicated programming 
languages. Such resources are commonly employed in order to build, test, 
and monitor apps whilst appropriating the features and constraints of 
particular platforms and devices, thereby participating in the 
re-interpretation and re-evaluation of platform features and data. 
Furthermore, apps may also utilise a device’s built-in sensors for 
continuous data collection of movements, practices, and environments 
whilst being wirelessly connected to the cloud or other infrastructures, 
without the user necessarily knowing exactly when, how, or where 
(Mackenzie, 2010).

Approaching apps from an infrastructural perspective allows attending to 
the various socio-technical actors, layers, and inscriptions that inform 
app development, distribution, and usage in situated, distributed, and 
often dissimilar ways. Within such stacked intermediary infrastructures, 
platform logics of negotiation among heterogeneous stakeholders are 
multiplied and nested. This raises questions about the material and 
technological boundaries of apps and the subsequent need for 
methodologies to study apps’ socio-technical assemblages on multiple 
scales, attending to inbound and outbound data flows, governance and 
power, valuation, their political economy, and material semiotics. 
Previous research on apps -- initially emerging at the intersection of 
mobile studies and media studies -- considered mobile apps as a form of 
mobile or location-based media transforming and generating new forms of 
communication and sociality, places, and publics through the affordances 
and practices associated with mobile artefacts (Goggin and Hjorth, 
2014). While these studies raised general questions about the boundaries 
of apps, attention was primarily directed to apps as compartmentalised 
software applications and their relations with affect, bodies, and 
locales (Farman 2012; Matviyenko et al., 2015; Morris and Elkins, 2015). 
A second strand of app research has moved beyond such a single app focus 
and directed primary attention to the materialities and infrastructures 
of apps by engaging with their data cultures, material connections, 
political economic underpinnings, and ecologies (Albury et al., 2017; 
Farman, 2015; Goldsmith in Goggin and Hjorth, 2014; Horst, 2013; 
Nieborg, 2017; Wilken, 2015).

This special issue of Computational Culture welcomes proposals and 
projects from scholars and practitioners from across different 
disciplines interested in the advancement of app studies at the 
intersection of apps and infrastructures. Studies of mobile apps, 
platform native apps, and web browser apps or extensions are 
particularly encouraged. We specifically seek articles that bring 
together conceptual work with a technically and empirically grounded 
perspective, addressing the methodological challenges associated with 
the critical study of apps and their intricate relations to other 
software, platforms, and infrastructures. Contributors are encouraged to 
move beyond studies of single apps and their users in favor of 
approaches that explore apps as material artefacts alongside the 
infrastructures, political economy, and environments in which they are 
embedded and situationally enacted. We thus encourage interdisciplinary 
contributions that traverse boundaries between the fields of software 
studies, platform studies, cultural and media studies, science and 
technology studies, as well as political economy and data critique.

## TOPICS AND PROJECTS MIGHT INCLUDE

  * The relations between apps and their wider material and 
infrastructural environments, including app stores, development 
platforms and toolkits, analytics tools, advertising technologies, and 
cloud services.
  * The methodological and empirical challenges associated with the 
critical study of apps, including concerns about accessibility to mobile 
app backends and the limits of data retrieval through APIs or scraping 
methods as used in web research.
  * Studies of apps as articulations of technicity (e.g., how they are 
designed, built, maintained, and updated) and the data cultures they 
produce (e.g., what data do they collect or require).
  * Detailed empirical and critical studies exploring apps’ data 
cultures, usage tracking, technical dependencies and app permissions, 
sensor technologies, and wireless access points.
  * Inventive methods to conceptualise how apps are located or 
situated, given they are utilising a mobile device’s built-in sensors as 
well as accessing other resources from remote cloud infrastructures.
  * Studies of the political economy of apps (e.g., how apps are valued 
and monetized), the role of industry partnerships and third parties 
(e.g., how apps are re-interpreted or extended), and the politics of 
operability (e.g., how apps negotiate among stakeholders or interests).
  * Explorations of the techno-economic relations between the web and 
app ecosystems, including the dependencies of apps on web platforms and 
cloud services, as well as the regulations and limits of app development 
by device manufacturers and mobile operating systems like Android and iOS.
  * Explorations of the ways and mechanisms through which multiple apps 
are interconnected, forming collections, ecologies, and chains of apps 
in specific practices (e.g., task and content automation).
  * Media archaeologies exploring historical constellations of apps and 
their wider material and infrastructural environments and other 
historical approaches to app research.
  * Explorations of app stores as the primary environment or 
infrastructure for mobile apps, including contributions focusing on 
non-Western apps and app stores, apps’ update cultures, and their 
development cycles.
  * The ways in which different material and infrastructural 
environments, such as app stores, cater to distinct mobile operating 
systems, devices, and geographic regions.
  * Critical artistic interventions and research software tools that 
repurpose the affordances of apps, app stores and other native 
environments, and explore their data cultures.

## SCHEDULE

750 word abstracts should be emailed to (apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com)> by April 1, 2018.

Any queries can be addressed to the editors at 
(apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com) <mailto:(apps.infrastructures /at/ gmail.com)>.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the Computational Culture Editorial Board 
and the special issue editors.

Authors of selected abstracts will be notified by May 1, 2018 and 
invited to submit full manuscripts by September 15, 2018.

These manuscripts are subject to full blind peer review according to 
Computational Culture’s policies. The issue will be published in March 2019.

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of 
interdisciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational 
objects, practices, processes and structures.


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