I am Scientific Director of the department Data Services for the Social Sciences at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Köln (Cologne), and Professor for Research Data Management for the Social Sciences at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. Prior to this, I was leading the team “Digital Society Observatory” as part of the department Computational Social Science at GESIS. From 2021-2023 I was also co-leading the Research Data and Methods unit at the Center of Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum. In 2015, was one of two inaugural Digital Studies fellows at the Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Center. Until 2012 I worked at the Department of Information Science at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.
selected activities
Some of my recent or upcoming activities:
- New paper, co-authored with Marco Wähner, Annika Deubel and Johannes Breuer: “Don’t research us” – How Mastodon instance rules connect to research ethics published in Publizistik (Aug. 2024).
- Together with colleagues at GESIS, University of Mannheim and LMU Munich we will work on a BMBF funded project to set up a competency center for data quality in the social sciences (KODAQS project, lead by Beatrice Rammstedt, Nov. 2023-Nov 2026).
- We hosted a hybrid event called “Conference on Harmful Online Communication (CHOC)” in Cologne in November 2023.
- The book chapter “The Role of Participants in Online Privacy Research – Ethical and Practical Considerations” by Johannes Breuer, Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda, and me published in “The Routledge Handbook of Privacy and Social Media” is available open access.
- Our work on “A Total Error Framework for Digital Traces of Human Behavior on Online Platforms” is published in Public Opinion Quarterly (arxiv also has the extended version of the TED-On freamework).
- Paper with Olga Zagovora, Roberto Ulloa, and Fabian Flöck: “‘I updated the <ref> ‘: The evolution of references in the English Wikipedia and the implications for altmetrics.” appeared in Quantitative Science Studies: doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00171.
on the web
Google Scholar • Twitter • Blueskye • my profile at GESIS
Katrin Weller 