Associate Professor Nanna Bonde Thylstrup receives ERC grant

Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Associate Professor at MSC, has received one of the prestigious ERC Starting Grants for her new research project, 'Data loss: the politics of disappearance, destruction and dispossession in digital societies' (DALOSS).

With the new project, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup will explore the many, as yet not fully understood, aspects of everyday data loss, including how the loss of data is defined and how it is perceived.

We are taught to believe that we live in an age of data accumulation, and that it is this accumulation that enables both the scientific advances and political and ethical challenges we face today. Yet, the premise of Thylstrup’s project is that every technological revolution also always entails a loss.

Empirically, the project will focus on three archival regimes of loss: web archives, public administrations and community archives. Attending to loss as a structural and generative condition of datafication will help us understand not only how, but also why data-driven societies “forget”. What is at stake in the research agenda of DALOSS is two-fold: an immediate challenge to visions of datafication as simple progress or accumulation, and a more fundamental deepening of knowledge of how new digital regimes of loss generate future ethical and political relations.    

The project will run for 5 years and will involve a project team of 4 scholars: Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, one PhD and two postdocs. The advisory board consists of Louise Amoore (Durham University), Orit Halpern (TU Dresden), Geoffrey Bowker (UC Irvine), Taina Bucher (University of Oslo) and Niels Brügger (Aarhus University).

The ERC Starting Grants are funded by the European Research Council, the European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. The Starting Grants are given to ‘excellent younger scientists, who have 2 to 7 years’ experience after their PhDs, to launch their own projects, form their teams and pursue their most promising ideas’ (read more on the ERC website).

Read more about Nanna Bonde Thylstrup’s ERC grant in this CBS News item. For further information, contact Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, nbt.msc@cbs.dk.