Ongoing sociotechnical processes that render activities, bodies, and texts into calculable units for extraction, optimization, and governance across platforms and institutions.
Datafication names the heterogeneous operations—technical, legal, economic, and affective—through which bodies, texts, and practices are translated into signals, features, logs, and metrics that can be stored, recombined, modeled, and acted upon. In a postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist register, this is a material-discursive process: the sensors, scrapers, prompts, annotation schemas, licenses, dashboards, and policies are not neutral conduits but part of the apparatus that co-produces what counts as “data,” how it can travel, and what forms of action it authorizes. Following Haraway, this is an informatics of domination that also offers sites for situated accountability and worlding; following Barad, datafication enacts agential cuts that make some relations sensible and computational while excluding others. The result is a world where writing, reading, classroom activity, and even hesitation or revision are discretized as events that can be optimized, audited, and predicted.
Within this ecology, enabling and constraining forces are entangled. Datafication affords feedback at scale, iterative drafting and revision traces, large-sample exploratory analysis of genre and rhetoric, and forms of collaborative composing that widen participation. At the same time, it intensifies metricization, surveillance, and homogenization of discourse by privileging what is machine-legible and operationalizable. Infrastructural elements matter: scraping practices and data licensing set the bounds of what models can “know”; annotation labor and content moderation sediment contested norms into training corpora; logging and telemetry shape classroom and platform behaviors; policy regimes (institutional and governmental) redistribute risk, responsibility, and reward. These operations are not background; they are co-authors of pedagogy and of what becomes sayable, writable, and valuable.
A postqualitative approach treats datafication as a phenomenon produced by an apparatus rather than a pre-given substrate. Inquiry therefore attends to how agential cuts in scraping, labeling, prompting, and logging enact the object of study and configure ethics and accountability. Rather than reducing analysis to codes and themes, researchers follow how metrics, sensors, dashboards, and interfaces performatively compose the field, tracing entanglements among matter and meaning. This aligns with posthumanist commitments to distributed agency and with new materialist attention to the vitality of infrastructures, standards, and protocols. Methods become compositional and diffractive: reading policy through telemetry, prompts through student traces, and model outputs through licensing contracts to map differences-that-matter in how the classroom is being materially remade.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, instructors and students are enfolded into platform infrastructures whose scraping, labeling, filtering, and logging practices co-author creativity and assessment. Datafication enables formative feedback loops, process tracing, and experimentation with prompts and revisions, which can deepen craft knowledge and make tacit composing moves visible. It also channels attention toward what platforms can measure, stabilizing certain genres and tones while narrowing linguistic heterogeneity. Classroom affects—anticipation, anxiety, relief—are shaped by dashboards, detection tools, and usage logs that redistribute trust and suspicion. Authorship and originality are enacted within telemetry, prompt histories, and revision diffs, where accountability becomes infrastructural. Designing assignments, rubrics, and policies thus becomes apparatus design: deciding which signals count, which traces to retain, and how to remain accountable to those whose data and labor sustain the system, including annotators and moderators who rarely appear in course materials but shape what models output.