Dr Addie McGowan is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Data Civics Observatory, a research centre dedicated to exploring and representing the character of places and the people, institutions and infrastructure that make them. Her research interests include digital platforms, tourism, advertising, market studies, and digital culture.
The Platform Economy
Dr McGowan’s PhD research explored the digital economy, looking at how the use of platforms such as Airbnb make places visible online, how this affects local and tourist perceptions of place, and how these platforms shape the way we see a city. According to Dr McGowan: “How you see the city is a product of where you’re standing and the tools you use to look.” For instance, when we search online for somewhere to eat, we see the options ordered for us by the logics of the platforms we use. Is the place somewhere we have been before, has it been recommended by many others, has the business paid to promote it? This just one example of how digital platforms order and shape how we make and experience place.
While traditional businesses create goods or sell their services, platform businesses such as Airbnb profit from interactions between people who use their platform. For her PhD research, Dr McGowan spoke to Airbnb hosts, exploring their experience of using the platform, finding the platform mediates their content and governs their actions. She said: “It’s cool to demystify these things [platforms] together with my participants.”
Dr McGowan found that platforms “de-professionalise” the act of hosting, so that they are encouraged to perform the role of friends rather than professional guides. To get good user reviews, businesses must interact with customers as the platform dictates. Dr McGowan found that: “People using digital platforms are governed by the interests of those platforms to produce content that adds value to it.”
Illuminating invisible edges of cities through data
Dr McGowan first became involved with the Data Civics Observatory through the Covid Arcadia project in 2020, which looked at how independent businesses in Edinburgh used digital services to respond to the pandemic. While undertaking her PhD from 2019-2023, Dr McGowan continued to work with the Observatory on the North Edinburgh Granton Project, which enabled her to continue discovering local businesses, and to help business owners understand and use digital platforms to promote their business.
When she finished her PhD in 2023, Dr McGowan took on the role of Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Observatory. The Data Civics Observatory works with people, communities and organisations on the edges of the city of Edinburgh, empowering them to represent their diversity and expertise online using data-driven innovations.
Dr McGowan’s latest research project will explore the socio-technical qualities of knowledge graphs, a data configuration used by many of the world’s largest platforms, including Airbnb and Google. Dr McGowan explains that there is an opportunity for computer scientists to explore the social dimensions of knowledge graphs, and for social scientists to leverage them as a great resource for sociological research.
Funded by the Big Ideas Accelerator, this project aims to build an interdisciplinary community of practice that works with and on these objects. Currently in development, the project will host a a series of workshops that invite participants to make and design a knowledge graph. The aim is to use design to educate sociologists about the potential of digital methods and encourage computer scientists to consider the social implications of the data used in machine learning.
