Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

Call for Participation - Big Sister

Hi there!

Are you interested in how digital platforms such as Facebook or Twitter classify and profile you? Are you curious about why they recommend you certain products and not others? Have you been surprised by how Spotify or Amazon come to predict your tastes? Have you received strange or even nonsensical recommendations? Do you think digital platforms fail to capture your "true" identity?

We are studying all these questions in the research project "Algorithmic Identities: Issues and reactions to digital data collection and algorithmic inferences in everyday life", developed by researchers from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the University of Warwick.

We need your collaboration!

We developed a smartphone app - Big Sister - that creates profiles and recommendations similar to those that digital platforms make every day for their users. Through analyses of your social media accounts, this app will make inferences about your personality and recommend you songs that you might like based on the information collected. Some of these predictions and recommendations might be familiar, but some might surprise you.

To participate, we ask that you use Big Sister for two weeks and allow us to interview you about your experience. Our aim is to produce a better understanding of how identity is shaped and staged in a world that’s increasingly mediated by opaque digital technologies. We hope that this experience will give you a greater insight into how these kinds of apps work!

Interested?

If you are interested in participating, we invite you to answer this short online questionnaire. We will contact you within a few weeks to explain how to download and test the Big Sister app!

Any questions? Please email Scott Wark: S.Wark@warwick.ac.uk

Do you use these digital platforms to discover new products, like books, songs, movies, television shows, etc, by following their algorithmic recommendations? These include the “Discover” feature on Spotify, for example. (required)
The following questions will provide us with some more information about who you are so that we can ensure that we recruit a representative sample of participants for our study. This data will be retained on Warwick servers and will only be used for academic purposes.
Please provide us with an email address so that we can contact you about participating in our research project. If you like, you can also provide a phone number (though this is optional)
Privacy notice
This form will be used to manage participation in a research project that is being conducted by researchers from the University of Warwick, Coventry, the United Kingdom and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile. All data we collect will be used for non-commercial, academic research purposes only. After your participation in the project ceases, we will retain this data for a period of ten years, in line with the requirements of our research funding partners (The Wellcome Trust). After this period of time, your data will be destroyed.

The University of Warwick is the Data Controller of any information you have entered on this form and is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection Legislation. The University's Data Protection webpages provide further information on your rights and how the University processes personal data. If you wish to submit a data subjects rights request, make a complaint or report a suspected personal data breach, please contact the University’s Data Protection Officer by email at infocompliance@warwick.ac.uk.

Spam prevention

Failure to load reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA is a utility used to verify you're not a robot filling out this form. Unfortunately this has failed to load correctly.

Please try reloading the page. If the problem persists, or if you are in a country which blocks Google products, please contact us by using the ‘page contact’ link at the foot of this page.