Plankton Research Group · Vienna & Innsbruck · est. 2002
We live in a world that argues with models and statistics. But who can really follow what lies behind a scientific plot? Which data were selected, which models applied, which alternatives discarded? In a democracy, everyone should be able to check that. In practice, almost no one does — not out of disinterest, but because the tools to verify the procedure or to build a second reading are missing.
The Plankton Research Group is a citizen-science initiative with connections to institutional research.
Three pillars
Pillar 01
Our publications deliver not only results but the entire path leading to them: data sources, processing steps, alternative model specifications, replication kits. If you want to compute our findings differently, you can. Open science is programme, not appendix.
Pillar 02
Through programmes such as the As-If Science Jam, we make the micro-techniques of statistical manipulation — cherry-picking, p-hacking, survivorship bias, axis choice — tangible. Whoever has played through the mechanism themselves recognises it in election campaigns, tabloid press, and policy papers. Resilience built not through fact-checks but through familiarity with the procedure.
Pillar 03
We curate datasets from public sources (Eurostat, AACT/ClinicalTrials.gov, OECD, WHO and others), build replication kits and annotated methodology notebooks, and make them publicly accessible. A bridge between institutional data sources and everyone who wants to work with them — researchers, students, journalists, interested citizens. Open data must not only be free but also usable.
Current research fields
Quantitative methodological critique · Data visualisation · Empirical studies of the placebo effect and of phenomenological mechanisms of action · Science communication.
Scientific discourse moves from rhetoric to collaborative exploration when every argument carries its data path.
Instead of „trust me" — „let me show you."
Instead of isolated findings — connected knowledge. Instead of static claims — verifiable paths.
Plankton continuity · since 2002
The Plankton Research Group continues the Plankton line founded in Innsbruck in 2002: a free space for interdisciplinary experiments at the intersections of media art, science and open-source design — without regard to added value or profit maximisation. The collective has become a research address. The attitude remained.
The predecessor collective plankton Labs lives on as a pioneer narrative at michaelhackl.net/contexts/plankton-labs.
You may say „we" to us.
