Karin is associate professor Media & Culture Studies and project lead Humanities at Data School at Utrecht University. She received her PhD from Utrecht University (NL) in 2014 on the concept ‘liveness’ in media studies. In 2014/2015 Karin was lecturer Television and Cross-Media at the University of Amsterdam. She returned to Utrecht University as assistant professor in 2015 and was visiting fellow at the London School of Economics in 2017 and 2018.

Her research contributes to Software Studies (“tool criticism”) and the emerging field of Critical Data Studies. More recently she is exploring Streaming Video – in relation to media policies and innovative methods for studying these platforms.

Karin is author of the book The Future of Live (Polity Press, 2016). She is co-editor of the volume The Datafied Society (AUP, 2017), Situating Data (AUP, 2023) and the special issues “Big Data Histories” (2018) for TMG and “Critical Technical Practice(s)” for Convergence. She has published in outlets such as Television and New Media, Media, Culture and Society, Social Media + Society Big Data and Society, and First Monday.

Karin is also affiliate and impact liason at the Centre for Digital Humanities.  Here she leads interdisciplinary research projects with external partners and is part of the GenAI in Education Humanities taskforce.

Current Projects

  • 2024-27: Streaming Video SIG
  • 2023-25: AI in Education (USO) WP Critical AI Literacy
  • 2022-4: Data Donation pilots Netflix, GenAI (with Dennis Nguyen)
  • 2022-4: Value-driven recommendations (co PI with Christine Bauer for DPG Media & AI Lab)

Supervised Ph.D. students

  • Joris Veerbeek on AI for Journalistic Inquiries (with Antal van den Bosch, Mirko Tobias Schäfer and Joris van Eijnatten – cofinanced by De Groene Amsterdammer & AI Labs)

Past

  • Tim de Winkel on Fringe Platforms (with Mirko Tobias Schäfer and José van Dijck)

Past Projects

  • 2022-3: Journalism & democracy: Corona reporting (co PI with Dennis Nguyen for Algemeen Dagblad & AI Lab)
  • 2022: Data center imaginaries on Twitter (for Data School)
  • 2021: An exploration of search algorithms on employment websites and their effect on equal opportunity (for College for Human Rights)
  • 2019: Public support and community binding of KRO NCRV in a digital age (co PI with Eggo Müller for KRO NCRV)