What is it about computational communication science?

In this episode of #aBitOfCCS, Jana Bernhard-Harrer interviews Said Unger from the University of Münster about his research on combating disinformation through prebunking interventions. Said’s study, "Immunize the Public against Disinformation Campaigns: Developing a Framework for Analyzing the Macrosocial Effects of Prebunking Interventions," explores how Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) can...

Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we discuss misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic with Lotte Schrijver, a PhD candidate in Strategic Communication at Wageningen University and the Pandemic and Disaster Preparedness Center. In her study, "In Search of Truth: A Refined Approach to Collecting and Annotating Data for BERT-Based Misinformation Detection," Lotte explores the challenges of trai...

Tune in to the #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore state communication and public trust during the COVID-19 pandemic with Christian Schwaderer, a PhD candidate at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Christian’s study, Navigating Trust: Comparative Insights into Crisis Communication Strategies and Public Perception , examines how government communication strategies on social media and in press confe...

Credibility is a crucial concept in communication science and received severely increased attention, again, with CCS. That is, it serves everybody as a signpost to navigate the web whilst also being scrutinized by some via (AI-driven) signals that suggest trustworthiness. Cuihua (Cindy) Shen is Professor of Communication and Co-Director of the Computational Communication Research Lab at the Depart...

Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication and Information at the U of Massachusetts Amherst, is our guest, and he is on a mission to fix platforms. Not because he thinks they are inherently bad, but because there are several things about platforms that research (not least CCS) tells us are flawed. Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU...

Join us in the newest episode of #aBitOfCCS Podcast featuring Dr. Mónika Simon, a Postdoctoral researcher at the UvA, unraveling Narratives of (Dis)Trust in the digital realm. In this episode, Dr. Simon discusses her research focused on tracing information flows in contemporary media, utilizing advanced computational methods and cross-platform analysis. Explore her paper "Linked in the dark:...

Dive into the latest episode of #aBitOfCCS Podcast featuring Sean-Kelly Palicki, a PhD candidate at TU Munich, as he explores multilingual document sampling and the impact of keyword translation strategies on automated text analysis. In this engaging conversation with host Jana Bernhard, Sean discusses key findings from his study, "Selecting Relevant Documents for Multilingual Content Analysis," p...

Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), so we want to bring some differentiation into the bigger picture. For this, Jean Burgess, Distinguished Professor of Digital Media in and founding director of the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology, is our guest. She has been focusing on social implications of digital media technologies, platforms, and...

Step into the world of language model-based chatbots with our latest podcast episode! Join us for an in-depth exploration of the study titled "The Silence of the LLMs: Cross-Lingual Analysis of Political Bias and False Information Prevalence in ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Bing Chat." In this insightful episode, our host engages in a compelling interview with the researchers behind the stud...

Explore the latest episode of #aBitOfCCS Podcast featuring Mar Castillo Campos, a research assistant at Loyola Andalucía University, as she delves into the use of computational methods, including GPT and CNNs, for automating media bias detection. In a conversation with host Jana Bernhard, Mar discusses the simplicity yet effectiveness of this method in uncovering biases by comparing media coverage...

In this episode, we look at the question of how digital media affects the well-being of users - a question that researchers have been debating for a long time. From a communication science perspective, there are many questions in this field of research and new approaches to solving them using computational methods. In this episode, we look in particular at the measurement of media use and the new...

Tune in to #aBitOfCCS Podcast as we explore cross-cultural communication in a pandemic with Ofer Shinar, a research student and teaching assistant at Tel-Aviv University, currently at LMU Munich. Ofer shares insights from his study, "Semantic Network Analysis of Students' Confessions During a Global Pandemic: A Cross-National Study," delving into intercultural media usage and Semanti...

Katya Ognyanova (Associate Professor at Rutgers U) is our guest and she is an expert on studying social networks. What's the societal problem with that, we hear you ask. Well, a lot of political knowledge and information and particularly mis- and disinformation spreading on the internet builds on social networking parameters such as strong and weak ties or partisanship among groups. Katya talk...

In this episode we talk about platforms and their power. This includes the relevance of social media metrics to users, the gatekeeping function of platforms, and fragmentation trends. For these topics, our guest is the ideal expert to talk to: Subhayan Mukerjee (Assistant Professor at the National U of Singapore) is a computer scientist, mathematician and (computational) communication scholar. Wha...

Continuing with political language online, we seek to understand the relevance and divergence of news on the internet. Sounds trivial? Well, unfortunately, it isn't: What is "contemporary" news is decided upon by many rather than a few, it contains journalistically verified messages as well as mis- and disinformation and fake news. Jo(sephine) Lukito (Assistant Professor at the U of...

It is not very hard to find dispute, also harsh dispute, online. A phenomenon also called digital contention, this raises several questions such as why are controversies more pronounced on the web? Have people turned into a rude mob in recent years or does the web help the quarrelsome to become more present? Also, what does this mean for our research, the theories and methods we apply? On that, Em...

Let's put on your legal suit and join Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) welcoming Natali Helberger (Distinguished Professor of Law & Digital Technology, with a special focus on AI at the U of Amsterdam). We talk about the difficulties that come with regulating newly emerging technology. We also talk about all kinds of upcoming EU regulations...

In this episode, Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) talk to Ágnes Emőke Horvát (Assistant Professor in Communication and Computer Science at Northwestern University where she leads the Lab on Innovation, Networks, and Knowledge, LINK) about what gender biases are, their origins and how prevalent these systematic misrepresantions are. Moving to Computa...

How to measure racism in news media is the main question in today's episode. Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam looks into racist and discriminative language as well as dynamics of racism in some 30 years of German-speaking news media. As that's quite a lot of data, of course Ahrabhi also builds on CCS methods. Yet, in addition to the mere amount of data, coding racism also bears big questions of va...

Today's CCS study is about the application and particularly the development of dictionaries to apply to quantitative text analyses. Anke Stoll (together with Lena Wilms and Marc Ziegele in this publication from 2023 ) developed a dictionary to detect German incivility. She did so through a combination of manual and automated approaches, through classic word lists and word embeddings. Hosted by...

In today's episode, Frederic R. Hopp ( ⁠@Freddy_Hopp ) discusses with Emese Domahidi ( ⁠@MissEsi⁠ ) and Mario Haim ( ⁠@DrFollowMario⁠ ) about morality. What's that, why does it affect our daily lifes and our social cohesion, what does it have to do with media content, and how can it be measured? CCS research offers a wide variety of tools to handle morality but also comes with quite a lot...

Let's dive into another CCS study, together with Jana Bernhard. This time, hosted by Mario Haim, Jana talks about her approach to topic modelling through algorithmic embeddings to analyze political communication in Austria from 2012 to 2021. Jana and Mario discuss the potential need for more sophisticated methods, they explain the approach Jana has taken, and they discuss whether it was actual...

Let's dive into a CCS study, together with Waqas Ejaz. In this episode, hosted by Valerie Hase, Waqas tells us about why and how he used topic modeling (LDA) for analyzing news coverage on climate change in a low-income country such as Pakistan. In that, and apart from data access, Waqas and Valerie discuss the sensitive decision of the appropriate number of topics in topic modeling. Ejaz, W.,...

In this first episode of the second season, Fabienne Lind ( @FabienneLind ) discusses with Emese Domahidi ( @MissEsi ) and Mario Haim ( @DrFollowMario ) about the English centrism in academia and how this affects our CCS research. This particularly includes the method of content analysis where we use pre-trained models and/or build on training data that have been affected by a largely western and...

What is it about Computational Communication Science -- and about big societal problems? We -- Emese Domahidi (@ ⁠⁠MissEsi⁠⁠ ) and Mario Haim (@ ⁠⁠DrFollowMario⁠⁠ ) -- are back with season 2 and with two exciting changes: First, we do not address "big data" and "algorithms" up front anymore but discuss societal problem that have been addressed by computational communication sci...