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Discursive Power in Contemporary Media Systems

Contemporary media systems are shaped by diverse constellation of organizations, groups, and individuals contributing information to national and international news flows. In our project, we analyze interdependencies and power relationships among these new constellations. We do so through the concept of discursive power: the ability of contributors to communication spaces to introduce, amplify, and maintain topics, frames, and speakers in interconnected communication spaces.

Theory-Driven

Our project is theory-driven. We examine new manifestations of information flows in contemporary media systems. To identify power relationships between contributors to information spaces, we rely on established theories of public discourse, agenda setting, and framing. In this, we remain open to potential adjustments to these theories dependent on new conditions of digital communication spaces.

Comparative

Our project is comparative. We compare discursive power in information flows in four countries with different constellations of traditional and new contributors to information spaces. These countries are Germany, United Kingdom, USA, and South Korea. This allows us to determine which of our findings are shared across digital communication spaces and which are specific to regional variations.

Computational Social Science

Our project uses data and methods from computational social science. We run large-scale continuous data collections online, in order to map the various sources and actors contributing to digital communication spaces. Based on these collections, we use (semi-)automated approaches for the identification of topics, frames, and speakers in the collected textual evidence.

about
team

Team

We are an interdisciplinary team of early-career researchers coming from computer, information and the social sciences. Our interdisciplinary backgrounds allow us to realize the research potential of computational social science informed by both computer and social science without being limited by either.

an

Jisun An

Principal Investigator

Jisun An is a scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU). She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge, the United Kingdom in 2015. Her work focuses on computational social science and journalism. Recently, she has been focusing on detecting media bias and framing from news and social media. She has been a member of the program committees of major computer science conferences, including The Web Conference (WWW) 2016–2019 and The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2012–2019.

jungherr

Andreas Jungherr

Principal Investigator

Andreas Jungherr is an assistant professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz. His work focuses on political communication and the effects of digital technology on politics. He also examines the use of digital trace data in the social sciences. He is the author of Analyzing Political Communication With Digital Trace Data: The Role of Twitter Messages in Social Science Research (Springer: 2015) and the forthcoming Retooling Politics: How Digital Media are Shaping Democracy (with Gonzalo Rivero and Daniel Gayo-Avello, Cambridge University Press).

Oliver Posegga

Oliver Posegga

Principal Investigator

Oliver Posegga a professor at the Department of Information Systems and Social Networks at the University of Bamberg and a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on understanding the collective dynamics of digitally enabled networks, such as collective behavior and intelligence in organizational and societal settings. Recently, his work has focused on the dynamics of social networks, crisis management, crowdsourcing, data- and information quality, and contemporary media systems.

team
publications

Selected Publications

publications
funding

Funding

Our project has received generous funding by the VolkswagenStiftung in the funding line “International Research in Computational Social Sciences”. | Project Information

funding