The lab organises several events to connect researchers working on/with digital research methods. An overview of events organised by the lab can be found here.
Last week, DigiComLab hosted a successful end-of-year event bringing together colleagues and Research Master’s students. During the event, six student grant recipients and four faculty seed grant recipients presented their ongoing research.
The presentations showcased a wide range of topics, methods, and approaches, including interactions with social robots, news exposure on social media, and several studies on interactions with large language models. The event offered a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas, learn about ongoing projects, and connect across the DigiComLab community.
This year, DigiComLab hosted a guest lecture by Alex Barco Martelo from the University of Deusto. In his talk, titled “GenAI as a Tool for Social Inclusion”, Alex explored how artificial intelligence, and generative AI in particular, can be used beyond productivity and innovation.
Drawing on a project developed in collaboration with Cáritas Gipuzkoa, a non-governmental organization working with socially disadvantaged communities, the lecture examined the potential role of generative AI in supporting social inclusion among migrants and young people in vulnerable situations.
DigiComLab opened the new year with a New Year event bringing together colleagues and Research Master’s students. The event featured a keynote by Rupert Kiddle, who introduced his computational work, ranging from news recommender design and embeddings during his PhD to social simulation with LLMs in his postdoctoral research. He also reflected on the opportunities and frictions that come with the interdisciplinary nature of computational methods in communication science.
In addition, four students pitched their grant-winning thesis projects.
On 25 February, Stijn Peeters demonstrated the 4CAT tool. 4CAT is an open-source application developed at the UvA to facilitate the collection and processing of data from social media platforms. The tool can be accessed through a web interface, which means no programming is required. However, for researchers with programming knowledge, 4CAT offers the possibility to add new data sources and custom processing.
Want to learn more about 4CAT? Check our the website for details!
Several scholars affiliated to the Digicomlab are studying media literacy and digital competence. Amongst others, they investigate how we can increase internet users’ abilities to acces and comprehend media messages and to evaluate them. During this meeting hosted by Annemarie van Oosten, ASCoR scholars presented their work on the topic in order to find the common ground in this work and foster collaboration. One of the projects focusing on this is the DigIQ project, check out their website to learn more about it!
In October 2024, Saurabh Khanna and Irene van Driel introduced Digicomlab members to PictoPercept: A tool designed to assess societal biases and perceptions. This tool is based on visual survey methods and available here. It presents users with two images of different individuals and asks them to select one of these images. Embedding this task in different questions and instructions allows scholars to capture sensitive societal perceptions and the potential biases that people hold.
Do social media algorithms contribute to the spread of misinformation? Does YouTube radicalize its users? Are Google search results fostering gender biases? These are the kind of questions that research evaluating algorithmic systems (or: algorithm auditing) is trying to address. In this talk key findings of such work were highlighted.
Aleksandra Urman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich. She studies how information technologies can affect socio-political processes across different national contexts.
At the end of the academic year, the Digicomlab hosted a Digital Methods Fair at ASCoR. During this fair, several researchers working at the lab pitched their projects. There were booths providing information about the usage of several digital methods, such as eye tracking and AI for communication research. Through this event, researchers and students interested in digital research method got to know more about the work done by the lab and connected with others to start new projects!
During the last member-meeting of the academic year, Lara Wolfers and Susanne Baumgartner hosted a session on the usage of Experience sampling methods (ESM). They shared their insights into the advantages and challenges associated to this method as well as information on analysing the data that can be gathered through this method. Accompanied by several examples from their own work, this meeting was a very good opportunity for those interested to learn more about the method!
Taught by Daniel Mayerhoff, the Digicomlab hosted a workshop providing a soft introduction to agent-based modeling using the user-friendly software NetLogo. The workshop was aimed at social scientists without extensive programming knowledge seeking to use simulated data alongside empirical research.
Social simulations can be used at the hypothesis formation stage, applied for analyzing cases that are difficult to study in an ethically acceptable way, or can help to fill gaps in the causal inferences.
