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 Department of Communication at UC Davis. In this episode, she, Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau)...

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 Munich) talk with Ethan about why social media seems to be broken, what possible ways to fix it...

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: A network approach to understanding information flows within the Dutch Telegramsphere" co-authored...

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," published in Computational Communication Research. Check out the full study at...

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 cultures, as well as new and innovative digital methods for studying them, for quite some time...

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 study—Aleksandra Urman from the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich ([email protected]) and...

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 from different sources on the same story. Discover more in Mar's study titled "Natural Language...

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 opportunities presented by digital data and computational methods, as well as the associated...

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 Semantic Network Analysis. Hosted by Jana Bernhard, this episode offers a brief yet insightful journey into the method...

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 talks Emese (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario (Professor at LMU Munich) through network essentials, the...

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. What's more, he also brings a global perspective on the use of news and the power of platforms, as...

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 Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media) guides us, Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario...

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, Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) talk with...

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 (such as the Digital Services Act, DSA, the Digital Markets Act, DMA, and the AI Act) and the...

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 Computational Communication Science, we then discuss how gender biases (and inequalities, more...

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 validity and ethics for coders and annotators -- an issue where CCS might also be able to help. In this...

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 Emese Domahidi, Anke takes us through her approach, the challenges, and of course the potentials she...

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 of challenges. Freddy takes us through them and discusses with us how research on morality is also affected by...

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 actually worth it. Her study is currently in preparation for publication but interested listeners can get a...

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., Ittefaq, M. and Jamil, S. (2023). Politics triumphs: A topic modeling approach for analyzing news...

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 English-speaking perspective. And we discuss multi-lingual text analysis and the many advantages as...

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 sciene recently. For that, we talk to several awesome scholars from a broad variety of sub fields. Second, we start a sub...

It is the season finale and Emese Domahidi (TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (LMU Munich) reflect on what it is about computational communication science. We start by briefly looking back at the previous twelve episodes to characterize the ongoing endeavors and challenges of CCS before spending the larger part of this episode on discussing CCS' coming of age. We use some sports metaphors to depict the establishment of collaborations, of professional norms and values, and of to-be-built research...