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Both companies had been previously involved in the development of databases for border and migration management. While there has been a growing amount of publicly available documents that show what kind of technologies are being implemented, for how much money, and by whom, there has been limited engagement with digital methods in this field. Moreover, critical border and security scholarship has largely focused on qualitative and ethnographic methods. Building on a data feminist approach, we propose a transdisciplinary methodology that goes beyond binaries of qualitative\/quantitative and opacity\/transparency, examines power asymmetries and makes the labour of coding visible. Empirically, we build and analyse a dataset of the contracts awarded by two European Union agencies key to its border management policies \u2013 the European Agency for Large-Scale Information Systems (eu-LISA) and the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (Frontex). We supplement the digital analysis and visualisation of networks of companies with close reading of tender documents. In so doing, we show how a transdisciplinary methodology can be a device for making datafication \u2018intelligible\u2019 at the European Union borders. <\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/20539517221124586","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,21]],"date-time":"2022-09-21T07:38:55Z","timestamp":1663745935000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":32,"title":["Neither opaque nor transparent: A transdisciplinary methodology to investigate datafication at the EU borders"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"9","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-8214-8380","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ana","family":"Valdivia","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of War Studies, King\u2019s College London, London, UK"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-2010-9006","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Claudia","family":"Aradau","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of War Studies, King\u2019s College London, London, UK"}]},{"given":"Tobias","family":"Blanke","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7657-1895","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Sarah","family":"Perret","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of War Studies, King\u2019s College London, London, UK"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2022,9,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr64-20539517221124586","unstructured":"Achiume TE (2020) Racial and xenophobic discrimination, emerging digital technologies, and border and immigration enforcement. 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(2021) Missteps and mismanagement at Frontex. Scandals plunge Europe\u2019s border agency into turmoil, Available at: https:\/\/www.spiegel.de\/international\/europe\/missteps-and-mismanagement-at-frontex-scandals-plunge-europe-s-border-agency-into-turmoil-a-d11ae404-5fd4-41a7-b127-eca47a00753f (accessed 28 October 2021)."},{"key":"bibr15-20539517221124586","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.4324\/9780429398186"},{"key":"bibr16-20539517221124586","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.7551\/mitpress\/11805.001.0001"},{"key":"bibr17-20539517221124586","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.7551\/mitpress\/11926.001.0001"},{"key":"bibr104-20539517221124586","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/0539018412456918"},{"key":"bibr19-20539517221124586","unstructured":"Douo M, Izuzquiza L, Margarida S (2021) Lobbying Fortress Europe: The making of a border-industrial complex, corporate Europe observatory. 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