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Helen Margetts, professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK, held her talk as one of the keynote speakers at the Herrenhausen Conference "Society through the Lens of the Digital" which took place from May 31 till June 2, 2017, in Hanover. At the conference, the experts discussed how the humanities and social sciences deal with the social challenges of digitization. The introductory words are held by Florian Süssenguth, acatech, Germany. The Herrenhausen Conference "Society through the Lens of the Digital" explored the role of the social sciences and the humanities in a society saturated with debates on the effects of digitization: Parties, NGOs and the public sphere explore ideas of digital democracy. Luminaries of business try to map and unlock the potential of big data and of platform capitalism. Data journalists experiment with modes of describing the world not through linear texts but through algorithms and interactive visualizations while intelligent systems have to learn to nav