What is it about computational communication science?

In this episode, Prof. Emese Domahidi from TU Ilmenau explores the ethical questions at the heart of computational social science research. She reflects on the responsibilities that come with using methods such as automated text analysis, machine learning, large-scale data collection, and AI, asking not only what these tools make possible, but also what researchers should do with them. Emese discu...

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks with Sarah Jewett from the London School of Economics and Political Science about the challenges of working with traumatic and high-stakes data in computational social science. Sarah’s research examines how defendants accused of war crimes express remorse—if at all—across legal archives, and what patterns of emotional expression...

In this episode, Prof. Anja Bechmann from Aarhus University guides us through the complex legal and ethical landscape of working with digital trace data in social media research. She explains the challenges researchers face around data access and compliance, especially given the evolving regulations like the Digital Services Act. Anja shares practical advice for navigating these issues responsibly...

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks with Larri Miller (she/her, they/them), a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  The conversation centres on Larri’s dissertation research, which combines computational analysis grounded in qualitative methods. We discuss their study “Defending the Status Quo: Exploring r/Tr...

In this episode, Professor Hartmut Wessler from the University of Mannheim unpacks the evolving role of theory in Computational Communication Science (CCS). Hartmut explains why strong theoretical frameworks remain essential for making sense of complex data and how computational theories differ from traditional approaches in communication research. He also shares which theories he finds most compe...

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks to Miriam Milzner and Daniel Thiele from the Weizenbaum Institute’s research group on the Dynamics of Digital Mobilisation about detecting coordinated online manipulation in the era of generative AI. They introduce coorsim , an open-source R package that identifies semantically similar coordinated posting—addressing a key limita...

In this episode, Professor Mario Haim from LMU Munich breaks down what it really means for research to be robust — covering key concepts like generalizability, validity, reliability, reproducibility, and replicability. Mario explains how these ideas connect and why they matter, especially when studying opinionated communication with computational methods. He shares practical insights on common pit...

In this episode of aBitOfCCS, Keonhi Son (Mannheim Centre for European Social Research) discusses her study on how women were talked about in the Weimar Republic’s parliament between 1919 and 1932. Using quantitative text analysis and semantic network methods , Keonhi examines how terms such as woman , mother , homemaker , and (female) worker were used in Reichstag debates from 1920 to 1932 — and...

In this episode, Dr. Aleksandar Tomašević from the University of Novi Sad takes us beyond text-based analysis to explore how emotions expressed in videos can be measured and understood. Aleksandar explains why studying non-verbal cues—especially facial expressions—is becoming crucial for understanding political communication online. He walks us through different methods for detecting these express...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Johannes Gruber from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam to unpack the world of language models. Johannes explains what language models really are and how they shape how we interact with information — from powering everyday chatbots like ChatGPT to supporting advanced research. We break down how these systems work behind the scenes, what they’re great at, and where we...

Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore the computational workflow behind digitizing a historical society magazine. Christian Lendl joins us to discuss his paper Digitizing the Aristocratic Elite: Computational Challenges and Methods in Processing the Wiener Salonblatt (1870–1938). The episode highlights how AI-driven workflows can open new possibilities for digital humanities research. Re...

In this episode, we’re joined by Prof. Eetu Mäkelä from the University of Helsinki to break down the world of word embeddings. Eetu explains what word embeddings are in simple terms, how they fit into the bigger picture of language models, and why they’re so powerful for exploring relationships in language — from the famous King–Queen example to applications in studying opinions. We look at how re...

Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we dig into the growing tension between performance and sustainability in computational text analysis. Sean Palicki, a researcher at TUM, joins us to discuss his recent paper Don’t Look Up: Evaluating the Tradeoff between Performance and Sustainability of LLMs for Text Analysis . In this episode, we explore how large language models (LLMs) compare to lighter me...

In this episode, we’re joined by Prof. Damian Trilling from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who opens the door to the world of machine learning for opinion research. Damian explains how citizens consume and share news today — and how machine learning helps us make sense of these patterns at scale. We unpack the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning and explore how blending...

Tune into the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore how large language models classify online political speech about sexism. Aditi Dutta, a doctoral researcher at the University of Exeter, joins us to discuss her study on how automated moderation systems often misclassify anti-sexist speech as harmful—raising important questions about fairness, resistance, and digital democracy. CONTENT WARNING: This e...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Valerie Hasse from LMU Munich to demystify one of the most widely used tools in computational text analysis: the dictionary. Valerie explains how computational dictionaries relate (or don’t!) to the everyday dictionaries we know, and breaks down how they actually work behind the scenes. We explore what dictionaries are good for, when to build your own versus us...

In this episode, Prof. Jamal Abdul Nasir from the University of Galway reveals why pre-processing is the backbone of all text analysis. He breaks down key steps like defining documents, tokenization, removing stop words, unification, and stemming vs. lemmatization. Jamal also explains unigrams vs. bigrams and how modern NLP techniques like byte-pair encoding are changing the game. Plus, he shares...

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Fabienne Lind from the University of Vienna, who sheds light on how computational methods transform the way we study opinionated communication. Fabienne shares her experience researching political emotions on social media in the CIDAPE project and explains what it really means to “code” when we’re working with text. We explore how computational tools help us fi...

Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore how to measure something as abstract and slippery as uncertainty in political speech. Ella MacLaughlin, a PhD candidate at Utrecht University, joins us to discuss her ongoing research on how politicians in the US, UK, Germany, and the Netherlands express uncertainty in public communication. In this episode, we dive into the challenges of capturing un...

In this episode, we are joined by Prof. Helle Sjøvaag, journalism researcher and founding member of the OPINION Network. She shares how the network came to life and why it’s vital for studying how opinions form and spread online. We explore how digital spaces — from social media to news sites — shape what we think and how we express it. Helle unpacks the hidden influence of technology, power, and...

In this episode of #aBitOfCCS, Jana Bernhard-Harrer sits down with Denise Roth, a PhD student at the Strategic Communication Group at Wageningen University & Research. Denise’s research focuses on how science is communicated by political elites and the implications for the relationship between science and society. Her study, "In the Crossfire: Online Hostility Towards Public Figures Amid Polit...

In the first episode, Wendo King'ang'i  and Christian Baden dive into the concept of opinionated communication — what it is, how it shows up in our daily lives, and why it matters. They also touch on the current state of research and what the future holds for this fascinating topic.   In this podcast we aim to introduce and discuss the OPINION COST Action CA21129. The network convenes earl...

Join us on the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we dive into political agenda-setting with Daniel Sandvej Eriksen , Post-Doc at the University of Aarhus, Department of Political Science. In this episode, we discuss Daniel’s latest research, "Initiate and Elevate! How Political Parties Can Set an Agenda." His study introduces The Issue Initiation Model , which explains how political parties proactiv...

In this special episode of #aBitOfCCS, Jana Bernhard-Harrer sits down with Marvin Stecker, a PhD student at the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna. Marvin is part of the AUTHLIB project, which focuses on illiberal challenges to democracy. Unlike our usual focus on specific computational methods, this episode explores a study Marvin conducted with colleagues from OP...

In this episode of #aBitOfCCS, Jana Bernhard-Harrer chats with Hung Nguyen, a research fellow at the German Institute for Adult Education – the Leibniz Centre for Lifelong Learning. Hung shares insights from his study, "A Sentiment-Based Approach to Measuring Multidimensional Party Positions with Transformer." The study introduces ContextScale, a framework that uses AI to analyze party positions b...