Article on In-App Communication in the New M&K Special Issue

In the article “Beyond the Black Box: A Multimodal Approach to Understanding In-App Communication,” Patrick Zerrer, Paul Pressmann, and Cornelius Puschmann, together with Philipp Krieter, introduce new methodological approaches to capturing in-app communication. The article was published in the M&K special issue “The Datafication of Communication – New Methodological Approaches and Challenges”.

The study starts from the observation that mobile devices are central sources of information, while established automated methods face limitations in recording communication within apps.

Based on two case studies, the authors develop two approaches: first, identifying relevant media exposure across apps using app tracking and screen recordings; second, linking recorded exposure to the content actually seen in order to derive content features and generate enriched datasets.

The article outlines the advantages and limitations of both approaches and proposes conceptual frameworks for processing and analyzing multimodal data.