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.
Digital activism has been gaining increased attention in recent years: the media coverage of #MeToo stories from all around the world, the political debates on racial discrimination and police brutality in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the growing number of anti-vaccine groups on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic – all illustrate the rise of this phenomenon and its inclusion in the broader public discourse.
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.
Chinese society is moving towards a significantly aging society with the number of older persons aged 60 years or over. Meanwhile, Elderly migration and mobility continue to be a fundamental part of the human experience. The nexus of aging, migration, and new media constitute a rather neglected area in studies on digital diasporas.
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.
China now constitutes the second-largest film market in the world. One significant change accompanying this unprecedented expansion has been the Chinese government’s active encouragement of film exports as part of its drive to augment soft power. This is closely allied to China’s most important foreign policy, known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to intensify China’s influence in Eurasia.
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.
The project analyses the ecology and development of mobile apps for language development in typical and atypical children from the perspective of software designers and developers. Software ethnography, quantitative analysis and modelling, and interviews with software developers will be integrated to identify how notions and theories of language acquisition and development in early childhood are translated into mobile applications for the market.
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.
This PhD project considers if and how the causes that foster or prohibit the development of digital literacy differ between children with a more or less vulnerable socio-economic background. It asks under what circumstances the development of digital media literacy is supported within households, and what these differences in how families deal with media within the household mean for children’s media practices in- and outside the home.
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.
Bjorn Beijnon | University of Amsterdam
This project investigates what role digital platforms play in the process of shaping the subjectivity of their users. Through the formalisation of surveillance platforms in users’ media ecologies, tech companies might not only have become able to quantify users’ attention and interactions, but they could also have become able to perform a new kind of subjectification: digital subjectification through data-driven decision-making systems that have emerged as powerful agents in users’ media ecologies.
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.
“While being familiar with one-on-one video chat, I could only imagine what a virtual PhD defence would be like. After all, it turned out to be a memorable experience”. Dr. Min Xu defended her PhD titled “Getting close to the media world: An ethnographic analysis of everyday encounters with the film industry in contemporary China”. What makes her defence especially unique is the fact that it was done entirely online. In this interview, Min shares her story with us.
On Thursday 9 April 2020, Min Xu defended her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Getting Close to the Media World: An ethnographic analysis of everyday encounters with the film industry in contemporary China’.
Nadica Denic | University of Amsterdam
This research aims to explore how auto-ethnographic migrant perspectives in documentary, as a unique window into how migrants imagine and negotiate their position in Europe, offer a layered understanding of the experience of migration.
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.
Nina Vabab | Utrecht University
In December 2017, a series of public protests occurred in different cities in Iran and continued into 2018. Following days of demonstrations, protesters chanted slogans such as “Reza Shah, bless your soul” referring to Reza Shah, the Shah of Iran from 1925-1941 and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty who was dethroned in the 1979 revolution. This led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.
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
Jeroen Boom | Radboud University Nijmegen
European cities have been privileged sites for thematizations of modernity, progress, and national identity. What happens at the margins of these cities tends to acquire less attention. This research aims to map the production of urban peripheries in contemporary cinema from a trans-European perspective in order to understand the political, aesthetic and affective dimensions of marginality across and amidst local expressions of urban deprivation. Europe’s urban outskirts have long been seen as either a violent spectacle or a placeless wasteland in the shadows of the city-center.
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.
Anna Marieke Weerdmeester | Utrecht University
This projects investigates the responsibilities of social media platforms, as gatekeepers of information, to protect European citizens’ right to receive information.
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.
Carmen Longas Luque | Erasmus University Rotterdam
Sports media is able to attract large audiences and in Europe, this is particularly the case with televised football. Despite journalism’s strive for objectivity, discourses in live coverages or post-match highlights may convey ideas that help produce and reproduce common stereotypes about race and ethnicity. While in other countries a difference in how football players are portrayed based on race/ethnicity has already been reported, it is still unknown whether this also applies to Spanish televised football.
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.
Lucie Chateau | Tilburg University
This project concerns the deliberative potential of digital public spheres and the possibility of finding a space for a critique of capitalism online, and the forms this critique might embody. To this, I will need to address the obstacles standing in the way of formulating a critique of ideology online.
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.
This research aims to tackles the question: What is the current view on algorithmic accountability within municipalities, (how) do they practice it, and how can this practice be improved? The first part of the investigation will thus sketch a general overview of algorithmic accountability, in collaboration with VNG Realisatie. Aside from this national picture, the project will also look into a concrete case: the algorithmic fraud detection system implemented by several municipalities to screen those who receive benefits (Hijink 2018), which were the topic of recent parliamentary discussion (Security.nl 2018).
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.
Veerle Ros | University of Groningen
The idea that photographic and filmic images contain traces of historical or actual reality has long been thought of as central to documentary’s defining quality as a ‘document’ of historical reality. This paradigm proved untenable in the face of arguments concerning the inherently constructed nature of representations, given additional momentum amidst the current digitization of visual media.
Bartosz Grzegorz Żerebecki | Depolarizing Narratives: The role of TV shows in promoting positive diversity attitudes
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalThe 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.
Victoria Balan | Discourses of Digital Citizen Activism
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalDigital activism has been gaining increased attention in recent years: the media coverage of #MeToo stories from all around the world, the political debates on racial discrimination and police brutality in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the growing number of anti-vaccine groups on social media during the Covid-19 pandemic – all illustrate the rise of this phenomenon and its inclusion in the broader public discourse.
Cedric Waterschoot | Constructive messaging and computer-assisted moderation of online platforms
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalOnline 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.
Yongjian LI | ICTs for integration: Digital Media and Internal Migration in Contemporary China
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalChinese society is moving towards a significantly aging society with the number of older persons aged 60 years or over. Meanwhile, Elderly migration and mobility continue to be a fundamental part of the human experience. The nexus of aging, migration, and new media constitute a rather neglected area in studies on digital diasporas.
Zhen Ye | Livestreaming Industry in China: An Investigation of Cultural Production, Labour and Platformization
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalWe 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.
Pengnan Hu | China’s global cinema: state-driven film-related co-operations with BRI countries
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalChina now constitutes the second-largest film market in the world. One significant change accompanying this unprecedented expansion has been the Chinese government’s active encouragement of film exports as part of its drive to augment soft power. This is closely allied to China’s most important foreign policy, known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which aims to intensify China’s influence in Eurasia.
Bianka-Isabell Scharmann | Fashion-as-Moving-Image: Dancing Figures, Swirling Fabrics
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalBy 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.
Karla Zavala Barreda | Apps for Learning: A software study analysis of mobile applications for language development in children
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalThe project analyses the ecology and development of mobile apps for language development in typical and atypical children from the perspective of software designers and developers. Software ethnography, quantitative analysis and modelling, and interviews with software developers will be integrated to identify how notions and theories of language acquisition and development in early childhood are translated into mobile applications for the market.
Inga Luchs | Data Discrimination: Rethinking Systems of Classification Beyond Homophily
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalMachine 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.
Denise Mensonides | Digital Literacy within the family context
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalThis PhD project considers if and how the causes that foster or prohibit the development of digital literacy differ between children with a more or less vulnerable socio-economic background. It asks under what circumstances the development of digital media literacy is supported within households, and what these differences in how families deal with media within the household mean for children’s media practices in- and outside the home.
Suzanne Oskam | Future Literature: Reading Skills in the Age of Digital Media
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalIn 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.
Bjorn Beijnon | Controlling Platform Media Ecologies: The Cultural Logic of Subjectification in Contemporary Surveillance Cultures
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalBjorn Beijnon | University of Amsterdam
This project investigates what role digital platforms play in the process of shaping the subjectivity of their users. Through the formalisation of surveillance platforms in users’ media ecologies, tech companies might not only have become able to quantify users’ attention and interactions, but they could also have become able to perform a new kind of subjectification: digital subjectification through data-driven decision-making systems that have emerged as powerful agents in users’ media ecologies.
Lisette Derksen | Radio Rocks!
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalIn 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.
Virtual defence and real memories: Doing academia in times of CODIV-19 pandemic
/in PhD Alumni, PhD Researchers /by Chantal“While being familiar with one-on-one video chat, I could only imagine what a virtual PhD defence would be like. After all, it turned out to be a memorable experience”. Dr. Min Xu defended her PhD titled “Getting close to the media world: An ethnographic analysis of everyday encounters with the film industry in contemporary China”. What makes her defence especially unique is the fact that it was done entirely online. In this interview, Min shares her story with us.
PhD Defence: Min Xu – Getting Close to the Media World
/in PhD Alumni, PhD Researchers /by ChantalOn Thursday 9 April 2020, Min Xu defended her PhD dissertation, entitled: ‘Getting Close to the Media World: An ethnographic analysis of everyday encounters with the film industry in contemporary China’.
Nadica Denic | Cinematic Ethics of Migration: Auto-Ethnographic Migrant Perspectives in Contemporary Documentary
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalNadica Denic | University of Amsterdam
This research aims to explore how auto-ethnographic migrant perspectives in documentary, as a unique window into how migrants imagine and negotiate their position in Europe, offer a layered understanding of the experience of migration.
Sal Hagen | “Is this /ourguy/?”: Tracing Political Identity Formation within Anonymous Online Subcultures
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalSal 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.
Nina Vabab | The Politics of Memory: Media and the Construction of Pahlavi Myth
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalNina Vabab | Utrecht University
In December 2017, a series of public protests occurred in different cities in Iran and continued into 2018. Following days of demonstrations, protesters chanted slogans such as “Reza Shah, bless your soul” referring to Reza Shah, the Shah of Iran from 1925-1941 and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty who was dethroned in the 1979 revolution. This led to the establishment of the Islamic Republic under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini.
Kim Smeenk | Making it personal. A digital humanities analysis of how subjectivity shapes the news
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalKim 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
Jeroen Boom | Cinematic Cartographies of Urban Peripheries in Contemporary Europe
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalJeroen Boom | Radboud University Nijmegen
European cities have been privileged sites for thematizations of modernity, progress, and national identity. What happens at the margins of these cities tends to acquire less attention. This research aims to map the production of urban peripheries in contemporary cinema from a trans-European perspective in order to understand the political, aesthetic and affective dimensions of marginality across and amidst local expressions of urban deprivation. Europe’s urban outskirts have long been seen as either a violent spectacle or a placeless wasteland in the shadows of the city-center.
Dulce da Rocha Gonçalves | Science for the People
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalDulce 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.
Anna Marieke Weerdmeester | Personalised Information Gatekeepers: Social Media Platforms’ Responsibilities to Protect European Citizens’ Right to Receive Information
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalAnna Marieke Weerdmeester | Utrecht University
This projects investigates the responsibilities of social media platforms, as gatekeepers of information, to protect European citizens’ right to receive information.
Zexu Guan | Cashing in online fame in China: beauty blogger and Internet celebrity economy
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalZexu 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.
Carmen Longas Luque | Race/Ethnicity discourses in sports media. How racist is Spanish televised football?
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalCarmen Longas Luque | Erasmus University Rotterdam
Sports media is able to attract large audiences and in Europe, this is particularly the case with televised football. Despite journalism’s strive for objectivity, discourses in live coverages or post-match highlights may convey ideas that help produce and reproduce common stereotypes about race and ethnicity. While in other countries a difference in how football players are portrayed based on race/ethnicity has already been reported, it is still unknown whether this also applies to Spanish televised football.
Arne van Lienden | Televising Difference: Race and Ethnicity in Polish Televised Football
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalArne 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.
Lucie Chateau | Finding Political Empowerment in the Digital Public Sphere: Affects, Affordances and Aesthetics
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalLucie Chateau | Tilburg University
This project concerns the deliberative potential of digital public spheres and the possibility of finding a space for a critique of capitalism online, and the forms this critique might embody. To this, I will need to address the obstacles standing in the way of formulating a critique of ideology online.
Tim de Winkel | Fringe platforms: Researching the role of the contesting alternatives to the mainstream social media platforms
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalSince 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.
Maranke Wieringa | Approaching algorithmic account(-)ability: developing tools to foster formalized and practical transparency in municipal data projects
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalThis research aims to tackles the question: What is the current view on algorithmic accountability within municipalities, (how) do they practice it, and how can this practice be improved? The first part of the investigation will thus sketch a general overview of algorithmic accountability, in collaboration with VNG Realisatie. Aside from this national picture, the project will also look into a concrete case: the algorithmic fraud detection system implemented by several municipalities to screen those who receive benefits (Hijink 2018), which were the topic of recent parliamentary discussion (Security.nl 2018).
Kun He | From Civil Society to News Reports: How Populist Discourse affects News Discourse and Official Discourse in China
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalRecent 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.
Veerle Ros | The Subjective Frame: a Cognitive Approach to Authenticity in Documentary Film
/in PhD Researchers /by ChantalVeerle Ros | University of Groningen
The idea that photographic and filmic images contain traces of historical or actual reality has long been thought of as central to documentary’s defining quality as a ‘document’ of historical reality. This paradigm proved untenable in the face of arguments concerning the inherently constructed nature of representations, given additional momentum amidst the current digitization of visual media.