PhD Researchers

The support for LGBTQ people and immigrants is a contentious issue in Poland. Young people, who are still in high school, witness a strongly polarized public discourse. The national, pro-government media staunchly oppose pride parades and multiculturalism, while private ones take more liberal stances. This project wants to establish whether the media, which are now seen as part of the problem of tearing people apart, can also be part of the solution in bringing people together.

Online platforms, like social media or newspapers with comment sections, often struggle with moderating the enormous influx of new posts. The Better-MODS project, a collaboration between KNAW Meertens Instituut, Tilburg University and NU.nl, aims to improve the moderation practice of such online content by developing computer-assisted moderation tools. My research specifically deals with the recognition and computational classification of so-called constructive posts, the opposite of spam, toxicity or other unwanted content.

We are witnessing how the development of live-streaming practices is increasingly influencing Chinese people’s everyday life in social, cultural, and economic terms: The showroom live-streaming, known as xiuchang zhibo in Chinese, features various content of entertainment from singing and dancing to mundane everyday life activities such as chatting and eating.

By drawing on the rich history of fashion media from the 20th and 21st century – ranging from fashion magazines, fashion illustrations, filmed fashion shows for newsreels from early and silent cinema to feature films and contemporary productions such as fashion films – in a transmedial perspective, the project attempts to theorize and historize the relationship between fashion, dance and moving image media aided by a wide range of theories from film, media, fashion and dance studies.

Machine learning algorithms permeate our everyday life. They are used to discriminate against spam emails, to sort results in search engines and to recommend content. They find application in the detection of credit card fraud and in predictive policing. This PhD project seeks to investigate the key technical principles of machine learning in order to uncover underlying assumptions and beliefs.

In response to the feared decline in the value and quality of reading skills – and, following from this, concerns about the future of literature – under the influence of digital media, this project considers the question how reading skills change on the basis of interrelations between literature and new (digital) media.

In a society where every organisation strives for the attention of overwhelmed consumers, constant development seems key for long term existence. Creative industry is regarded as an example of this capacity, but the experienced medium of radio is overlooked in this perspective.

Sal Hagen | University of Amsterdam
This research will engage with the question on how shared practices of cultural production can function as forms of political identification within anonymous online subcultures. In recent years, anonymous and pseudonymous websites have been described as forming a vanguard in an ongoing “online culture war”. While this has bestowed these websites with political relevance, there has been a lack of research into the techno-cultural dynamics that structure these obscure communities.

Kim Smeenk | Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Journalism and Media Studies |
My project conceptualizes personal journalism and its epistemological underpinnings by analysing its forms and underlying practices between 1945 and 2018 in Dutch newspapers through a multi-method digital humanities approach. Personal journalism, in which journalists are transparent about how stories are shaped by the reporter’s subjectivity, has been gaining prominence. By foregrounding reporters’ subjectivity, personal journalism overtly shows how a story is grounded in their experiences and beliefs

Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves | Utrecht University
The project Science for the People will research the phenomenon of the public illustrated lecture in the Netherlands, focusing mainly on the period between 1880 and 1940.

Zexu Guan | Leiden University
Chinese beauty bloggers are social media users, mainly women, who produce makeup tutorials regularly and attract plenty of followers successfully. In China, they are called wanghong (网红, Internet celebrity). With the online fame, this group creates pop-cultural trends on social media platforms and boost the e-commerce business. By cashing in their online fame, they transfer their usage of social media into business, shaping the new type of employment and economy in the age of social media in China.

Arne van Lienden | Erasmus University Rotterdam (ERMeCC)
This research focuses on the ways in which hegemonic and stereotypical racialized discourses get reproduced in the domain of professional mediatized sports. It does so by focusing on the interplay between the content, the production process, and the audience reception of televised football in Poland and is part of the NWO-funded research project How racist is televised football and do audiences react? where the same is done in three other European countries.

Since 2016 the administrative (European Commission, 2018) – and public – incentive for more moderation caused several of the major social media, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, to take measures against hate speech (Fioretti, 2018), resulting in the removal of content and banning of users. Predominantly focusing on the alt-right communities, several alternative services have manifested (Zannettou, 2018, p. 1), that allow the speech that was banned on their mainstream equivalent.

Recent political trends and events, such as the Brexit, the triumph of Donald Trump in the US presidency election as well as the rise of populist parties and politicians in European countries, have brought the concept of “populism” to the center of global discussion.