Social Data Science Collaboration

Since 2019, the “Oxford-Berlin Social Data Science Collaboration” has been bringing together researchers and students from Oxford and Berlin who are interested in social data science and the digital platform economy. Together they develop ideas and work on research projects. The collaboration is part of the Oxford-Berlin research partnership of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA), whose aim is to build bridges between the University of Oxford and Berlin universities. The initiative was supported from the start by the then governing mayor Michael Müller, who saw the cooperation between the two locations and joint research as an opportunity for outstanding research and innovation in Berlin.

ECDF board member Timm Teubner and Fabian Braesemann, lecturer at the Oxford Internet Institute and associated scientist at the ECDF, look back on a successful cooperation in recent years and they would like to continue and expand this in the future. Since the beginning of the cooperation, there has been a regular exchange between master's students from the two locations as well as joint supervision of doctoral students. In addition, Timm Teubner and Fabian Braesemann regularly organize guest lectures in their respective courses in Oxford and Berlin in order to carry the exchange of knowledge into teaching.

The partnership has already resulted in several joint publications. In the joint article “Understanding the Platform Economy: Signals, Trust, and Social Interaction” the researchers examine the influence of various measures on trust in digital services on online platforms and in the research paper “Measuring Sustainable Tourism with Online Platform Data” they develop and compare machine learning algorithms that measure the ecological sustainability of hotels in Europe with data from an online platform. Both papers are available online as open access source.