The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMFTR) has published the shortlist for the national prioritization process for large-scale research infrastructures. GESIS impressed with its submitted concept: its proposal for the establishment of a “Research Infrastructure for Data from Large Online Platforms” (RIDLOP) made it onto the shortlist as one of nine projects.
Large online platforms are used by billions of people every day and are the central point of contact for a wide variety of purposes. Despite the omnipresence of services such as social media, search engines, and AI chatbots, scientific knowledge about their social, economic, political, and cultural impacts remains limited. An important reason for these knowledge gaps is the lack of reliable and quality-assured access to online platform data for research purposes.
GESIS is responding to this problem by setting up the RIDLOP research infrastructure. RIDLOP will enable scientific users to access data from online platforms in trusted environments for their research, evaluate its quality, and analyze it. This requires, for example, secure analysis environments and data documentation. RIDLOP relies on three different methods of data collection, each of which requires specific technical and organizational infrastructures: cooperation with operators of large online platforms, data donations by platform users, and data collected by researchers and made available for reuse. To turn this vision into reality, a large infrastructure project is necessary that is unique in the German and European scientific landscape.
Following the announcement of the shortlist, the BMFTR will now enter into discussions with the participating institutions, organizations, and states to find individual financing solutions for each of the projects on the shortlist. GESIS is looking forward to joining this process and advancing the RIDLOP concept.
Further information: https://www.gesis.org/ridlop
Contact: If you have any questions or are interested in collaborating, please contact Katrin Weller and Sebastian Stier.