The sustainable provision of software for cross-media practices and digital traces research: A co-creation approach for developing an infrastructure model for the digital diary and sorting apps MedTag and MedSort 2.0

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The fundamental aim of this e-research and IT infrastructure project is to develop a good practice model for providing software for research on media and communications. To undertake this as closely as possible to the needs of researchers in media and communications and to build up a sustainable community of researchers that applies this software and perceive themselves as future developers committed to its furtherance, we will take a co-creation approach. This good practice model will be refined with reference to two mobile apps and web-based tools for collecting and analysing data on cross-media practices and their digital traces: the media diary software MedTag and the extended q-sort software MedSort. Both applications exist as prototypes and have been deployed successfully in various research projects. Our project will generate a sustainable Open Source infrastructure and business model that makes it possible to secure a long-term development and availability of the software. As part of this, we will increase the security, optionality, usability and accessibility of the MedTag and MedSort software. Our aim is that media and communications scholars without advanced technical knowledge as well as participants in research projects feel comfortable with using this software. Co-creation advances other participatory approaches in software development by opening up a much more far-reaching role and degree of involvement to (future) users; in our case, other researchers applying this software for field research. Through a co-creation approach, we can build up a sustainable community of researchers using and developing the software as well as its infrastructure (including its business model) in a way that it is deeply anchored in the field of media and communication research within social sciences and the humanities, and the overall infrastructure can step by step also be opened up to other kinds of software in the respective area. This refinement and further sustainable development of MedTag and MedSort is based on the scientific demands placed on this kind of software as well as its future potential in the field of media and communications. This is driven by two current challenges in empirical research on media practices. This is first the challenge of cross-media with its subsequent requirement for research software that is able to collect data on media practices across different kinds of media. Second, there is the challenge of the digital traces left by users in online media which calls for software that is able to collect data to contextualise such digital traces in a proper way. These challenges are already partly addressed with the applications MedTag and MedSort in their present stage as prototypes. However, these applications and their infrastructure need further development to fully reflect the challenges involved and to be sustainable.