Concepts of boundaries have shaped research and analysis across the social sciences, particularly in Science and Technology Studies (STS), media studies, and organization studies. The recent turn to datafication – the growing pervasiveness of data-driven methods, computational infrastructures, and data analysis across diverse social areas – is also fundamentally concerned with boundaries: datafication is centrally implicated in the dissolution, perpetuation, and installation of diverse material and discursive boundaries. Despite this, research explicitly addressing boundaries in datafication, and employing different boundary concepts, remains limited.
The contributions aim to advance systematic exploration of boundaries and boundary concepts in the context of datafication. They investigate the potential and limitations of analytical concepts such as boundary objects, boundary work, boundary infrastructures, and related terms, as well as boundaries more broadly. The special issue will include empirical analyses, conceptual reflections, and methodological explorations on the interplay between datafication and boundary dynamics.