These are current projects by our group
The Digital Communication Methods Lab aims to support innovative work on methods, analyses, and scientific practices relevant to communication science. We organise regular lab meetings to discuss and share knowledge about cutting edge methods in communication research. In addition to lab meetings, we also serve as a hub for methodological consultation and collaboration. We also have a list of equipments to support data collection, including an eye tracker, VR glasses, and a telepresence robot.
In her VENI, Mariken van der Velden theorizes that political compromises force politicians to strategically communicate their decisions in order to mitigate electoral costs. Comparing the Dutch, German and Spanish case, she test her argument at three levels: the politicians level, employing advanced computational text approaches coupled with case-oriented approaches to identify how politicians make compromises and when they adapt their rhetoric to justify them; on the voter level, experimentally investigating the willingness to accept compromises using Virtual Reality techniques; and bridging the two by utilizing regression and experimental techniques to study the real-world effects of compromises.
Democracy requires news media that act as gatekeepers by monitoring, curating and interpreting information about important events. Today, many people obtain their news from a wide range and diversity of online gatekeepers, ranging from professional journalists to friends and strangers on social media. This has raised strong concerns regarding how people decide which gatekeepers to trust: low trust undermines the role of gatekeepers to inform society and control power, but blind trust leaves people vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation.
