From tool to tool-making: Reflections on authorship in social media research software

Abstract

Social media research software has come to play increasingly important roles in processes of knowledge production. While epistemological, logistical, legal, and ethical concerns put the spotlight on the software tools researchers are relying on, little attention is paid to the role of the ‘toolmaker’ beyond a vague idea of the ‘power’ wielded by those who design, develop, and maintain these technical artifacts. This paper seeks to address this role, both conceptually and with attention to practical concerns, as a form of hybrid and relational authorship. We thereby shift the focus from tool to tool-making, from artifact to practice, in an attempt to produce a different kind of ‘unblackboxing’ of tools than the somewhat overused tropes of open source code or open data. Our contribution proceeds in three steps. We first address tools and tool-making from a theoretical perspective, suggesting that their epistemological orientation reaches more deeply into the networks of research practice than words like ‘bias’ admit and proposing to consider the specific kind of hybrid authorship that emerges in this context. Calling on our own experiences as toolmakers, we then reflect on a cluster of issues where this authorial function becomes particularly visible. Here, we examine how motivations and commitments orient what a piece of software does and how it does it and discuss tool-making from the perspectives of co-development, maintenance and care, and ethics by design. We conclude by arguing that the most pressing concerns for tool-making lie in institutional arrangements that are crucial for the life of research software.