von Jennifer Gerbl

What is a trace? I spent a full day in a room with researchers from various disciplines and research fields such as computer science, human-computer interaction, psychology, sociology, and others, trying to answer this question and it was not so straightforward to answer. That was my experience at the „Traces, Breadcrumbs, and Patina“ workshop, held on the 18th October 2025 as part of the CSCW conference in Bergen, Norway. Thanks to the support from the SPP 2267 programme, I had the opportunity to attend both the workshop and the following conference. And it turned out to be very thought-provoking and fun time, one felt worth reporting back on.

The workshop was organised around the concept of “traces”. The concept has many names, including “footprints”, “breadcrumbs” or “patina”, and has been used repeatedly in different research fields. Still, there is no clear shared understanding across disciplines. The organisers therefore brought together researchers from a wide range of backgrounds with the explicit goal of working towards a clearer, more workable understanding of what traces are, how they are used, and how we might design with and for them.

For our research group, the workshop call felt like a natural fit. We have a long history of working with digital traces from collaboration systems, and our research project 2C-NOW² builds on our developed methods and concepts to conduct trace ethnography studies. Working with digital traces sits at the heart of our methodology. A workshop dedicated to unpacking the concept from multiple disciplinary angles was somewhere we could both contribute our experience but also gain some new perspective on our own approach.

In the morning of the workshop, participants spilt into smaller groups to discuss the interest statements each person submitted in advance. I presented our “Work Trace Visualiser”, an interactive tool developed as part of our 2C-NOW² project, that connects two complementary data streams: digital traces from enterprise collaboration systems such as document edits and ethnographic diary records about synchronous work periods and meetings. To others in the workshop, this level of conceptual and methodological specificity was useful, as participants were all at different stages of working with traces.
Throughout the day, the four guiding questions structured our discussions: What are traces? How are traces used? What are the benefits and risks of traces? And what is not a trace?

The last question proved surprisingly interesting, at least from my perspective. Coming from a computer science and informatics background, we are accustomed to working with a fairly bounded and technical understanding of digital trace data: records of activity generated through system usage, often in the form of event logs or sensor data (Howison et al. 2011, Østerlund et al., 2020).

However not everyone shares this understanding when thinking about “traces”. One moment stayed with me: one of the workshop organisers brought a photograph of her bathroom mirror, showing dried and fresh water droplets and toothpaste marks. Her point was that this could conceptually be considered a trace as these marks tell us something about what happened, when, and perhaps even by how many people. They have a longevity, some fresh, some dried, that encode temporal information. It was a small example, but it raised bigger questions about the dimensions of traces: How long does a trace last? Does the medium, physical or digital, fundamentally change its nature? In the afternoon, some participants went outside to photograph various “traces” around them: shoe marks on pavements, bird feathers in the grass, coffee stains on tables. Thinking in such metaphors helped to work through dimensions at a conceptual level and questioned the scope on what is and what is not a trace and provided good food for thought.

A particularly fun activity was one in which all participants physically positioned themselves across the room in response to prompts questioning our personal exposure to traces. These included “I sometimes feel exposed or judged by the traces I leave behind in digital systems” or “What if your computer automatically took a screenshot, so you could search everything you have done?”. Watching where everyone stood and then talking about what was their reasoning was quite interesting. While all workshop participants shared a fairly positive attitude towards using trace data for research, the activity brought some of the ethical questions of using traces into focus and let us think a bit more about the implication for privacy, trust, and about what traces should and should not be used for in research.

The workshop did not end with a formal definition. The point was more about allowing different disciplinary perspectives to be shared. I left with a richer vocabulary and a somewhat clearer sense of where our approach stands. Back in Germany, the conversations from Bergen fed directly into our own discussions as a research group, as we reflected on our dissertation topics and revisited what we define as digital traces, why we use them, and how.
After the workshop, I stayed on for the full CSCW conference. The sessions on remote meetings and hybrid work were particularly useful for my own research on the rhythms and flows of hybrid workgroups. I had the chance to speak directly with several researchers presenting in those sessions, and their work has since found its way into my own writing. I really enjoyed the experience and would encourage other researchers to attend such workshops as trips like this one let you see your work from a different perspective and leave you with new inspiration and energy.

References
Howison, J., Wiggins, A., & Crowston, K. (2011). Validity Issues in the Use of Social Network Analysis with Digital Trace Data. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 12(12), 767–797.
Østerlund, C., Crowston, K., & Jackson, C. (2020). Building an Apparatus: Refractive, Reflective, and Diffractive Readings of Trace Data. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 21(1), 1–22.