The University of Queensland’s Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies (DCS) will host a one-day symposium, Building Digital Platform Observatories, on 16 June 2026 at the UQ Brisbane City Campus in partnership with the Australian Internet Observatory.
Bringing together leading researchers from across Australia and internationally, the workshop will explore how digital observatories can strengthen public accountability and research capacity around digital platforms and automated systems.
The event responds to growing recognition that existing approaches to platform accountability often focus narrowly on transparency, rather than creating the broader “conditions for the practice of observing” needed to support sustained public understanding and governance of digital technologies.
Speakers and participants will discuss emerging infrastructure initiatives, new methods for platform research, and the institutional role observatories can play in enabling trustworthy and publicly accessible forms of observation.
The program features presentations from researchers including Liz McFall (University of Edinburgh), James Smithies (Australian National University), Daniel Angus (Queensland University of Technology), Kellie Vella (University of Queensland), and Laura Vodden (Queensland University of Technology), alongside sessions led by AIO collaborators Nic Carah and Julian Thomas.
Topics will include participatory data donation, access to platform data, humanities and social science research infrastructure, and the future of international observatory networks.
The workshop concludes with a facilitated discussion on building observatories as enduring public institutions and as part of an international array of research collaborations.
The event is hosted by DCS in partnership with AIO. The AIO is a co-investment partnership with the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) through the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (DOI: 10.3565/hjrp-b141). The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
