Some thoughts on digitalization research in times of Corona

Abstract

This volume gathers contributions to Siegen University’s early-career scholars-conference on digitalization research, which fittingly was held online on April 21st, 2020. In the following, I will elaborate on whether – and how – digitalization can be both the subject of and a challenge to inter- and transdisciplinary research. I first came up with the idea of said conference topic due to everyday experiences. When talking to colleagues about the subject, I quickly realized how popular research on digitalization is at our university – in fact, one might consider it a focus. Some research domains appear particularly likely to deal with digitalization, e.g. computer science, digital health and digital humanities, computational social science, research on sensors, robots and autonomous systems as well as studies on digital media. Certainly, today, digitalization research plays a crucial role in further fields of inquiry, for instance regarding virtual learning, architecture and spatial planning, art, philosophy, linguistics, literature studies or cognition science. Evidently, research on digitalization provides a common basis, which might enhance interdisciplinary understanding. However, this requires a shared language. To this end, which links can be made fruitful? As any other line of research, digitalization research may place emphasis on content. The content, however, possibly consists of topics that constitute well-known subjects of study in the respective discipline. For example, I, as a political scientist, could examine the digitalization of a parliament (which is a common subject of analysis in political science). Perhaps, I would focus on modes of virtual communication (while ideally bearing in mind that communication research, again, represents an established academic field, whose rich foundations, next to other disciplines’ bodies of research, may nowadays be complemented by insights from digitalization research) or on how the parliament is administered digitally. Likewise, insights from studies on social media appear relevant to political communication research, as social media gain importance for political communication. As the examples show, shared research subjects, structures and patterns emerge, which are of interest to multiple disciplines. Against this backdrop, future disciplinary analyses on digitalization may merely be specific variations, based on shared insight from various research domains. At Siegen University, such broad integration of academic disciplines is mirrored by the sheer existence as well as the work of the Special Collaborative Research Center on media and cooperation.