What is it about computational communication science?
29 episodes - English - Latest episode: 15 days ago -As "big data" and "algorithms" affect our daily communication, lots of new research questions arise at the intersection between societies and technologies, asking for human wellbeing in times of permanent smartphone usage or the role of huge platforms for our news environment. The growing discipline of Computational Communication Science (CCS) takes on a combinatory perspective between social and computer science. In this podcast, Emese Domahidi (@MissEsi) and Mario Haim (@DrFollowMario) open this discussion for students and young scholars, one guest and one question at a time.
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Episodes
#aBitOfCCS on measuring bias with Mar Castillo Campos hosted by Jana Bernhard-Harrer
April 08, 2024 10:00 - 25 minutes - 34.4 MBExplore 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 Languag...
How does digital media affect well-being?
March 21, 2024 17:38 - 1 hour - 91.3 MBIn 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 ch...
#aBitOfCCS on semantic network analysis with Ofer Shinar hosted by Jana Bernhard
March 01, 2024 11:00 - 33 minutes - 45.4 MBTune 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 metho...
How important are networks?
February 27, 2024 08:00 - 48 minutes - 44.5 MBKatya 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, th...
How powerful are platforms?
January 18, 2024 11:49 - 48 minutes - 111 MBIn 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 ...
How to study “contemporary” news?
December 13, 2023 08:00 - 1 hour - 138 MBContinuing 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 Mari...
How to study digital contention?
November 17, 2023 08:04 - 1 hour - 171 MBIt 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 Christ...
How to regulate new technologies?
August 15, 2023 19:23 - 54 minutes - 126 MBLet'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 challenges...
How problematic is gender bias?
July 25, 2023 09:28 - 1 hour - 139 MBIn 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 generall...
#aBitOfCCS on measuring racism with Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam hosted by Jana Bernhard
July 11, 2023 08:50 - 23 minutes - 54.3 MBHow 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 ep...
#aBitOfCCS on dictionaries with Anke Stoll hosted by Emese Domahidi
June 27, 2023 07:42 - 17 minutes - 16.5 MBToday'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...
Where is our moral compass pointing?
June 13, 2023 07:00 - 53 minutes - 121 MBIn 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...
#aBitOfCCS on algorithmic topic modeling with Jana Bernhard hosted by Mario Haim
May 30, 2023 07:49 - 29 minutes - 27.1 MBLet'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 ...
#aBitOfCCS on off-the-shelf topic modeling with Waqas Ejaz hosted by Valerie Hase
May 16, 2023 07:08 - 29 minutes - 68.3 MBLet'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 ...
How to explore global issues?
May 02, 2023 12:01 - 41 minutes - 95.2 MBIn 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 we...
Trailer Season 2
May 02, 2023 12:00 - 7 minutes - 16.2 MBWhat 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 ...
What is our field?
August 01, 2022 14:30 - 19 minutes - 18 MBIt 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 in...
How to measure human behavior?
August 01, 2022 14:30 - 34 minutes - 31.5 MBIn this episode, Emese Domahidi (TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (LMU Munich) talk to David Lazer (Northeastern U in Boston, MA), distinguished professor of political science as well as computer science and one of the founding fathers of the broader field of computational social science. With a focus on mis- and disinformation, we learn from him why it is so difficult to measure human behavior both and why it has become both more challenging but also more adressable online. Of course, we touch et...
Do communication scholars have to code?
July 05, 2022 14:29 - 57 minutes - 53.1 MBIn this episode, Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) discuss with Jacob T. Fisher (Assistant Professor at the U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) about the role of coding for communication scholars. Jacob just co-organized (along with Josephine Lukito, Frederic R. Hopp, and Felicia Loecherbach) the first ICA Hackathon and talks about his experience at the event in the podcast. From there, we tackle topics such as what programming and develo...
How to network in CCS?
May 23, 2022 08:00 - 43 minutes - 39.9 MBThe ICA's annual conference 2022 will start in a couple of days. In this episode, Emese Domahidi (TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (LMU Munich) discuss with Annie Waldherr (University of Vienna), current vice chair of the ICA's Computational Methods division, how to network in CCS. We touch upon the value of networking and how to network especially in the emerging field of CCS, given your specific career level. Of course, we also talk about the various receptions, the ICA dance, and other networki...
Does computer science need the social sciences?
May 03, 2022 07:31 - 50 minutes - 46.2 MBFlipping things upside-down in this episode, Emese Domahidi (TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (LMU Munich) discuss with Claudia Wagner (RWTH Aachen and GESIS) about whether and how computer science really needs the social sciences. Claudia's background as a trained computer scientist as well as her current role as Professor of Applied Computational Social Sciences allowed us to really dive into opposing expectations, clichés, hurdles, and especially the benefits of interdisciplinary work at the in...
How to audit algorithms online?
March 29, 2022 08:00 - 52 minutes - 48.1 MBIn this episode Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss with Juhi Kulshrestha (Assistant Professor at U Konstanz) what makes algorithms online a research object. We touch on topics like filter bubbles and echo chambers, biases, how to investigate algorithms, the role of platforms and companies, data sources and possible effects of algorithmic curation. Last but not least, we discuss how far this field of resesarch ha...
Why is today's data still not enough data?
February 21, 2022 09:00 - 1 hour - 58.4 MBTogether with Tetsuro Kobayashi (Associate Professor at City U of Hong Kong), Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss the dilemma with social-media tech giants like Facebook or Tencent which undoubtedly have but are hesitant to share adequate data with independent research. We also discuss how varying types of data have changed with the rise of computational communication science. And we talk about possible ways to m...
Why do you write your own software?
January 26, 2022 09:00 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBTogether with Felicia Löcherbach (PhD candidate at VU Amsterdam), Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss what research software is and why to code your own research software. Felicia gives unique insights into the topic using the example of a research software she developed from scratch. We also touch on topics like rewards and challenges, ethics, data security, systematic testing vs. quick and easy solutions and ho...
How to become a data scientist?
December 21, 2021 09:00 - 52 minutes - 48.2 MBEmese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) interview Till Keyling (former Senior Data Scientist at ProSiebenSat.1 and now Team Lead Software Engineering Data Science at PAYBACK) on how to become a data scientist. After learning what data science is, we look at what communication scientists can bring to the table, what university is capable of equipping us with, and what it is that potential employers look for in future data sci...
How can I get started with CCS?
November 25, 2021 09:00 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MBToday, Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss together with Valerie Hase (Research and Teaching Assistant at the U of Zurich) ways, approaches, guidelines, and routes to get started with computational communication science (CCS). We talk learning materials, compare intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, provide ideas and suggestions on where and how to find help and companions, and we tell our very own stories of how w...
How come data needs the social sciences?
October 27, 2021 06:41 - 47 minutes - 43.5 MBIn the second episode Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss with Wouter van Atteveldt (Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) the role of communication science in the field. Main topics are the nature and role of data for the social sciences and challenges in collaborations with computer scientists. We touch on topics like open science, reproducibility and replicability for computational communication...
What is Computational Communication Science and why would we need a podcast on that?
September 28, 2021 14:35 - 28 minutes - 26 MBIn this first-ever episode, Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Assistant Professor at the U of Leipzig) discuss the relevance of a social-scientific perspective in the computer-scientifically driven field of artificial intelligence. We briefly dig into Kate Crawford's recent book (https://www.katecrawford.net/) as well as the European Union's "Guidelines for Trustworthy AI." And we compare rather distinct understandings of relevance when it comes to a computat...
Trailer Season 1
September 28, 2021 13:37 - 4 minutes - 3.94 MBWhat is it about Computational Communication Science? As "big data" and "algorithms" affect our daily communication, lots of new research questions arise at the intersection between societies and technologies, asking for human wellbeing in times of permanent smartphone usage or the role of huge platforms for our news environment. The growing discipline of Computational Communication Science (CCS) takes on a combinatory perspective between social and computer science. In this podcast, Emese ...