ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on digital platforms in relation to higher education and academia. Specifically, it investigates Academia.edu, Google Scholar and ResearchGate as examples of platforms targeting the higher education sector, signing up hundreds of thousands of academics, allowing new forms and possibilities of relations and networking between them, and at the same collecting large amounts of data. The chapter first explores what kind of research possibilities the platforms and big data enable methodologically. Second, it focuses on digital platforms as objects of enquiry and explores what kind of social relations these platforms construct and what kind of social world they constitute.
