Here you can find the latest news about our group
We have some fantastic news to share: two CCS.Amsterdam researchers were granted prestigious NWO VENI research grants! Congratulations to Andreu Casas and Philipp Masur! See brief project summaries below. Free Speech and Censorship in the Digital Society: A computational study of the determinants and effects of political speech regulation by social media companies Andreu Casas, VU Amsterdam
Private social media companies increasingly play a role in regulating (political) speech online, posing a clear threat to democratic accountability.
The first part of the workshop on code quality organised by Wouter van Atteveldt and Urja Khurana took place yesterday. As expected during these times, it was taught in hybrid fashion: online and in-person at the VU University Amsterdam.
Code should be readable and reusable, but the how-to's are not often taught in a computational social science curriculum. Wouter and Urja filled in the gaps by covering the what and why, structure, documentation, typing and testing!
The CCS.Amsterdam mini workshops kicked off with a workshop on Git(hub)! Many thanks to Kasper, Wouter and Sanne for organising this!
We covered the basic stuff (what is Git, what is Github, init, clone, add, commit, push, pull) and the more advanced features (branches, forks, pull requests), tricky problems (oops I committed my API key) and convenient tools for writing better code (Codacy, Travis, Dependabot). Couldn't attend this workshop but also interested in learning more about Git?
We are excited to announce that a large number of CCS.Amsterdam's submissions were accepted for the upcoming conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Paris France, 26-30 May 2022. Keep an eye out for the following presentations! And do not forget to sign up to the pre-conferences! Presentations Jan Kleinnijenhuis; Anita Van Hoof; Mariken van der Velden; Wouter van Atteveldt. From COVID-19 to controversial freedom restrictions in the media, from incumbency bonus to political fragmentation.
On 9 and 10 October, a UvA-VU team consisting of Myrthe Reuver, Felicia Loecherbach, Nicolas Mattis, Sanne Vrijenhoek, and Marijn Sax took part in a 24-hour hackathon organized by the Dutch Public Broadcaster NPO. The teams were ask to help build solutions to promote diverse content to NPOstart users. The Geeky Griffins (as the team was called) built a new explore feature, as well as a match me up feature which — in line with a longstanding Dutch tradition — allows users to sneak a peek into the digital living room of other people through their open curtains.
We are happy to announce that two great PhD students join CCS.amsterdam in February: Zilin Lin and Mónika Simon!
Zilin and Mónika will be working on the ERC Starting Grant funded project NEWSFLOWS Modeling News Flows: How Feedback Loops Influence Citizens' Beliefs and Shape Societies. They will be using online field experiments, data donations and automated content analysis to study how information spreads in today's media ecosystem. Zilin will be supervised by Damian Trilling, Susan Vermeer and Kasper Welbers, and Mónika's supervision team consists of Damian Trilling, Anne Kroon and Kasper Welbers.
We are happy to announce that two new and very talented PhD students will join CCS.amsterdam team in September:
Marieke van Hoof will be researching Polarizing Issue Publics: the interplay of human choice and algorithmic selection, as part of the Digital Society initiative at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research, UvA. In this we will study the role of the digital media environment and AI in causes and effects of polarizing and radicalizing issue publics using two case studies, for example, the anti-5G movement, and the vaccination movement.
We are starting the holiday season in a very festive mood with good news on two ccs.amsterdam grant applications related to news algorithms and diversity:
Rethinking news algorithms: nudging users towards diverse news exposure: We improve news algorithms to stimulate people to read more diverse news. Algorithms such as used by Facebook and Google can unwittingly trap people in a “filter bubble”. Nudging people to read about more topics and perspectives makes them more aware of issues facing the country.
Fantastic news to start the summer: three ccs.amsterdam researchers were granted the prestigious NWO VENI individual research grants of 250kE each. Congratulations to Judith Möller, Mariken van der Velden, and Kasper Welbers!
See brief project summaries below, and check back here later to see the full project descriptions and research progress.
Vocal, Visible and Vaulting? (Dis)connected niche audiences in the age of artificial intelligence
Dr J.E. (Judith) Möller, UvA – Amsterdam School of Communication Research
We are very happy to announce the inaugural issue for Computational Communication Research! The articles are currently in production, but you can access the preprints using the links below. Please help us spread the word!
We would like to thank all reviewers, submitters, and editorial board members for contributing to the journal and for their feedback on this introduction. We would also like to thank Amsterdam University Press and especially our gold sponsors (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Network Institute, the University of Amsterdam / ASCoR) and silver sponsors (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, The Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and the Computational Communication Science Lab of the University of Vienna), for making this journal possible.
