Researchers affiliated to the Digicomlab work on digital research methods and aim to advance these methods to increase their usage within communication science. The methods that we focus on are:
A list of conference presentations and publications based on work done by members of the Digicomlab can be found here.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies are reshaping our media landscape in an extremely fast pace. This brings drastic changes to our communication environment, including the digitisation, personalisation and automation of media and communication in a wide variety of contexts – from interpersonal communication to news, health or politics, commerce, entertainment, and everything in between.
AI and related technologies – and the increasing availability of digital trace data – also open promising avenues and methods for communication research, which is much needed in such a complex environment.
Virtual (VR) and Augmented Reality (VR) are novel techniques which provide an immersive experience to the user. Whereas in VR the real world is completely replaced for a virtual one, in AR virtual aspects are added to the real-world environment.
Augmented Reality enables consumers to try out (virtual) furniture in their own living room, turn their living room into a game of Minecraft, replace their TV by projecting the screen on their wall, and even virtually transport themselves to another room.
Automated Content Analysis (ACA) refers to a collection of techniques used to automatically analyze data. Because our discipline often works with texts, the term Computational Text Analysis Methods (CTAM) is also often used. Yet, while communication scholars often work with text, there is an increased focus on applying computational methods to the analysis of images as these take on a predominant role on social media.
Given that more and more communication happens online and is available in a digital format, it makes sense to analyze this huge amount of data in an automated fashion.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies are reshaping our communication environment in an extremely fast pace. These changes encompass not only drastic changes to the media landscape, but especially to the partners with whom we communicate. More than a medium for human-to-human communication, computers and online environments now allow humans to communicate with machines, i.e., conversational agents in the shape of chatbots, socialbots, and virtual assistants.
Given the growing levels of sophistication and adoption of these agents, the Digital Communication Lab focuses on innovative research with (disembodied) conversational agents, including the content, causes and consequences of interactions with AI in the shape of conversational agents across different areas of communication.
The digital traces that people leave through their use of various online platforms provide tremendous opportunities for studying human behaviour and the antecedents, contents and consequences of communication in an increasingly digital world. Access to such crucial data is often a challenge, however, as much of the digital traces left by individuals are available only to the (large) digital platforms that have a central role in this digital ecosystem.
The Digital Communication Methods Lab supports a set of projects to develop methods and frameworks in which researchers partner with individuals willing to donate their digital trace data to academic research.
Experience Sampling Methods are methods whereby individuals are asked to report their experiences, emotions, or opinions at multiple intervals. These intervals can be based on fixed periods of time, or they can be event based. In the former example, individuals receive a request to answer questions at a fixed time, such as every evening at 21:00 hrs. An example of the latter is when individuals are asked to answer a set of questions every time that they used a specific medium.
Eye tracking is a method whereby individuals’ eye movements are tracked during a study. This can be done using various set-ups. In its most basic form, an eye tracker is connected to a computer screen and monitors people’s eye movements as they are using the computer. A more complex form is an eye tracker that is embedded within a set of glasses. While wearing the glasses, individuals can move around freely and in any setting while their visual attention to people and objects is tracked.
This page contains an overview of conference presentations and publications based on work by members of the Digicomlab:
2024 Sungur, H., Van Berlo, Z. M. C., & Lüwa, L. M. (2024). Enhancing cardiopulmonary resuscitation training with mixed reality: Improving cardiopulmonary resuscitation performance and enjoyment. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2023.0411
Möller, A. M., Vermeer, S. A. M., & Baumgartner, S. E. (2024). Cutting through the comment chaos: A Supervised Machine Learning approach to identifying relevant YouTube comments.
