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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Selected Publications
- Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Oliver Posegga, and Andreas Jungherr (2019). Political discussions in homogeneous and cross-cutting communication spaces: Interaction patterns and linguistic strategies on Reddit. In ICWSM 2019: Proceedings of the 13th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Menlo Park: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). p. 68–79. | PDF
- Andreas Jungherr, Oliver Posegga, and Jisun An (2019). Discursive Power in Contemporary Media Systems: A Comparative Framework. The International Journal of Press/Politics, doi: 10.1177/1940161219841543. (Online First). | PDF
- Oliver Posegga and Andreas Jungherr (2019). Characterizing Political Talk on Twitter: A Comparison Between Public Agenda, Media Agendas, and the Twitter Agenda with Regard to Topics and Dynamics. In HICSS 52: Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. University of Hawaii at Manoa: Scholarspace. p. 2590-2599. DOI: https://hdl.handle.net/10125/59697. | PDF
Funding
Our project has received generous funding by the VolkswagenStiftung in the funding line “International Research in Computational Social Sciences”. | Project Information