Digital platforms shape how people find news, shop, learn and talk to each other, but they are hard to study. Access to this data is limited using existing means, such as API and scraping, and the way content is delivered is highly personalised for each user, which makes it more complicated.

How do we study such data? In this workshop, we offer data donation as an alternative method to study platforms. The approach is: people request the data a platform holds about them, review it, and choose what to share with a research project. In this hands-on workshop, the Australian Internet Observatory (AIO) team will introduce data donation and show you the AIO Platform, free national infrastructure for running data donation studies with data download packages from platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and ChatGPT. The platform was built at UQ.

You will:

• learn what a data download package contains, and how to read one;
• work through the ethics of donation studies: consent, data minimisation and participant burden;
• build and test your own data donation project on the platform.

No coding experience is needed.