About

Bernhard Rieder is Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative. His research focuses on the history, theory, and politics of software and in particular on the role algorithms play in the production of knowledge and culture. This work includes the development, application, and analysis of computational research methods and the investigation of political and economic challenges posed by large online platforms.

After studying Communication, History, and Philosophy at Vienna University, he obtained a PhD in Information and Communication Sciences from Paris 8 University (2006), where he was subsequently appointed Assistant Professor at the Département Hypermédia, co-directing the "Création et Edition Numériques" Master's program. He has been a visiting fellow at Utrecht University's Centre for the Humanities and Descartes Centre and participated in the EMAPS project, an EU-funded study of the applications of electronic mapping led by Prof. Bruno Latour. In 2018, he joined the European Commission's Observatory on the Online Platform Economy as a nominated expert. His long-term investigation into the historical and conceptual foundations of information processing techniques – Engines of Order – was published in 2020 by Amsterdam University Press (print / open access)

Over the last 20 years, he has contributed to numerous software projects, mainly in the areas of digital research methodology, data visualization, and geolocalization. He used to write and maintain Netvizz, a data extraction application for Facebook, and, together with Erik Borra, released the DMI Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset as open source in 2014. A full list of research software is available here. Since 2020, his software work is part of the CAT4SMR (Capture and Analysis Tools for Social Media Research) project, funded by the Dutch PDI-SSH foundation.

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