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.
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.
CONVERSATIONS 2022 is hosted by the University of Amsterdam, through its Digital Communication Methods Lab, in collaboration with the University of Oslo, Centre for Research on Media Innovations (CRMI), and SINTEF – supported by the Research Council of Norway.
Professor Sundar’s presentation, co-sponsored by the Digital Communication Methods Lab, overviewed different ways of conceptualizing the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in human communication. It discussed key concepts and concerns in the study of AI. It introduced the speaker’s theoretical framework for human-AI interaction (HAII) based on the theory of interactive media effects (TIME), and describe recent studies that apply his HAII-TIME model to content moderation and recommendation systems.
