Proud to congratulate you, @azadekakavand.bsky.social, on your PhD defense – “Technology Affordances, Social Media Platforms & the Networked Far Right.” A remarkable achievement that combines years of hard work & building of skills that you now use at @bredowinstitut.bsky.social. Missing u already🥳

Every strong team needs time to pause, reset, and grow together. #TeamRetreat #DientenAmHochkönig

Ever asked yourself how to detect and extract social groups from texts with computational social science? @haukelicht.bsky.social and me have a solution for you out at @bjpols.bsky.social. You can also find the pre-trained models on huggingface!

New publication, out in Political Analysis: There is an increasing array of tools to measure facets of morality in political language. But while they ostensibly measure the same concept, do they actually? I and @fhopp.bsky.social set out to see what happens.

🚨 Neue Veröffentlichung! 🚨 Im sogenannten “Election Report” schauen wir uns die Nationalratswahl 2024 nochmal aus wissenschaftlicher Perspektive an und bereiten sie mit aktuellen Daten auf 🇦🇹🗳️🤝 📄 Lest hier: doi.org/10.1080/0140...

If you've recently wondered "What happened in Austria's last federal election" (and a lot happened!), we've got you covered:

Really happy to see my work with @dweisstanner.bsky.social published with @bjpols.bsky.social. In this letter, we look at symbolic class signalling through cultural consumption and how effective it is across voters of different parties. A thread 👇 (1/n) #OpenAccess - cup.org/3GSCIKV

Thinking about using #CSS methods to study #racism, #stereotypes or #hate speech in text? 📐 👉 Check out my first dissertation paper co-authored by @fabiennelind.bsky.social and @hajoboo.bsky.social just published in Annals of the ICA! @icahdq.bsky.social 🥳 🔗 doi.org/10.1093/annc...

This is the only score I shall ever share because it was easy and I suck at this game and my Fantasy-F1 predictions were absolutely rubbish and don’t we all deserve a tiny bit of happiness sometimes maybe God or fate acts through puzzle apps Connections Puzzle #756 🟩🟩🟩🟩 🟨🟨🟨🟨 🟦🟦🟦🟦 🟪🟪🟪🟪

📢 Big news for platform researchers across Europe and beyond: Today, the @ec.europa.eu adopted the Delegated Act for Article 40 of the Digital Services Act (DSA) – a long-anticipated milestone enabling researchers to request access to non-public platform data under Article 40.4.

Thrilled to share that this study, which I started back in 2021, has finally been published! 🎉 While topic modeling may not be the most cutting-edge anymore, the discussion on validation & standardization is still highly relevant. Proud of this work & contribution! 🙌📚 doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

Does anyone like data wrangling?

Doing important things at @epsanet.bsky.social …like locating the one veg canapé at the reception 👀 @stawi-univie.bsky.social @bseisl.bsky.social @mkaltenegger.bsky.social @alexanderdalheimer.bsky.social @marvins.bsky.social @elenaheinz.bsky.social @mascakir.bsky.social @thomasmmeyer.bsky.social

If you’re stressed with planning conferences, we’ve basically got a paper for every slot ;) #EPSA2025

🥳 Huge congrats to our @veronikaebner.bsky.social, @ruzza13.bsky.social, and @moritzsedlatschek.bsky.social on successfully defending their PhD project proposals today! ✨ Great studies ahead 👀 #CSS #polcom

🚨 NEW PUBLICATION! Who belongs to “the people” – and who does not? What a great way to start the week. I’m really happy that my article on populist in- and outgroup references is now out in @polstudies.bsky.social #openaccess 🔓 doi.org/10.1177/0032... 🧵 1/10

From text-as-data to sleep data collection, this year‘s #hackica25 in Boulder, CO, was a blast and we‘re proud to say that we‘ve (again) successfully hacked communication science. Thanks to all participants and see y‘all at #ica25 ✨

Today I was lucky enough to present my master‘s thesis on climate solutions journalism in the same panel at #ica25 as Kathryn Thier, who I cited so much in my thesis 😁 Great to see so many interesting presentations on environmental journalism 🌱 📸 @hdnrch.bsky.social

between that, Google Images being created because of Jennifer Lopez's v revealing green dress and Facebook's prototype being used to rate students' attractiveness, it really is quite striking and grim just how much of the modern internet was created by and for sleazy men

It still feels surreal, but on June 3, I defended my dissertation! 🎓 SO grateful to my reviewers @solecheler.bsky.social & Silke Adam, committee chair @hajoboo.bsky.social, advisors @anniewald.bsky.social & @nicolarighetti.bsky.social, co-authors Paul Balluff & Nanda Wijermans, & Team! 🙏✨ #PhDone

If you are interested in extracting moral values from text corpora, check out our latest resource, the extended Morality as Cooperation Dictionary (eMACD). Led by the brilliant @musamalik.bsky.social, we show that eMACD surpasses the (predictive) validity of previous moral foundations dictionaries 📕

Thrilled to see my 1st PhD paper out in #PartyPolitics! Based on ~15000 posts by 86 German subnat. parties (2015-2019), Simon Franzmann & I show that dominant & challenger parties differ in the use of policy-based vs symbolic & positive vs negative appeals. 🔓: doi.org/10.1177/1354...

Are you interested in social science methods training? Take a look at the Methods Ticker, a regularly updated overview of methods-related training courses coming up in the next months, provided by the Methods Lab at @weizenbauminstitut.bsky.social: methodslab.weizenbaum-institut.de/program/meth...

Building a Dockerfile for replication, I am not yet sure if I am solving more issues than I am creating for myself; but I will stagger on, dockeredly.

We're getting pizza and I'm obsessed with this slightly broken mural that used to be about eating with your hands but now it reads like Saruman's manifesto

After 3 packed days of research, workshops, and networking, #COMPTEXT2025 has officially wrapped up! In 48+ panels, 220+ presentations, and a full day of tutorials we received a great review of the state-of-the-art in our field. Thanks everyone and see you next year!

The success of COMPTEXT 2025 was made possible by the indefatigable and amazing work of the local organising team led by @fabiennelind.bsky.social + @hajoboo.bsky.social @univie.ac.at @compcommlab.bsky.social. The COMPTEXT Association is grateful for their work and to our sponsors (bit.ly/430VUye)!

Absolutely excited to host a roundtable on "Marginalised Voices and Perspectives in Computational Text Analysis" featuring @krangelie.bsky.social and @indiiigo.bsky.social at #COMPTEXT2025 🙌 We'll explore how bias and marginalisation shape methods and models - and thus scientific quality!

COMPTEXT 2025 – The Countdown is On! 🥳 ✅ The preliminary program is now available! Check out the amazing sessions, workshops, and speakers lined up for this year's event. Don't miss out – register today and secure your spot! 👉 Register here comptextconference.org/7th-annual-c... 👈

Who does Spiderman vote for? Who you vote for. In a new paper w/ @markuswagner.bsky.social we show that people engage in motivated projection of political identities. In the absence of explicit info on politics, individuals rely on valence to infer the politics of others doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

I was recently a guest on the great #aBitOfCCS podcast, to talk with @janabernhard.bsky.social about our new paper on citing software in text analysis journal articles. Have a listen, or, if you prefer reading: www.aup-online.com/content/jour...

Our new piece in Nature Machine Intelligence: LLMs are replacing human participants, but can they simulate diverse respondents? Surveys use representative sampling for a reason, and our work shows how LLM training prevents accurate simulation of different human identities.

🚨 #Data alert 📣 We just released #ParlLawSpeech – full texts of more than 40k bills, 28k laws, and 3 mio. parliamentary speeches from 7 countries (AT, CZ, DE, DK, ES, HR, HU) and the EU! If you study democracy with #TextAsData / #NLP methods, this is for you! A short 🧵 (1/3) #PoliSkyData #polisky

typisch linker ÖRR-bias: Scholz kriegt doppelt so viele Mikros wie Merz.

An important ruling not only for the specifics of this case - but also more generally, as it shows the possibility of *private* enforcement of the Digital Services Act. So no need to wait for the EU Commission to challenge X, which it seems unwilling to do so far.

Tried solving a coding issue through GPT. It only gave me unhelpful advice, checking things I had previously tested, and after multiple back-and-forths I gave up. Solved it on my own, told GPT "hey btw this would have worked", and then it smugly suggested a (wrong) simplification of my code.

💡Main take away of this study: #CSS scholars, cite the software tools you use, and make it easy for others to find and cite yours‘! Big congrats @marvins.bsky.social! Great to see this published!

First ever publication alert! Do you credit all the software you use in your research?👀 In a new article in Computational Communication Research, we investigate when software gets mentioned in research articles and what makes a tool more likely to be cited. Read it here: doi.org/10.5117/CCR2...

Thank you everyone for a record-number of submissions—we are humbled by the overwhelming interest in COMPTEXT 2025! The variety of research topics, methods, data presentations, and tutorials preview a great conference at the University of Vienna! Notifications are due Feb. 15!

Interested in pursuing a PhD in comparative politics (institutions, behaviour, representation, parties)? We have a four-year position at our department, with great conditions, lots of freedom and a reasonable teaching load. Get in touch if you have questions! jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

My commitment issues are unique to GitHub, I swear.

Submission for #COMPTEXT2025 is still open until January 15! We are looking forward to receiving your proposals for papers, panels, and data presentations! We also appreciate it if you can spread the word and circulate shorturl.at/AmocX! See you at the University of Vienna on 24-26 April!

I'm fully aware that this is a total waste of my time, but given today's news about an Apple settlement relating to Siri audio recordings I wrote this blog post about why I still don't think that companies are spying on us through our phone's microphones […]

thanks guardian

Very interesting paper that is making rounds on Bluesky but please notice this issue is for *proprietary* LLMs like the OpenAI ones. Running Llama locally was remarkably stable. In general, using any kind of proprietary software, especially through an API, is bad for reproducibility.

Pleased to share the latest version of my paper with Arthur Spirling and @lexipalmer.bsky.social on replication using LMs We show: 1. current applications of LMs in political science research *don't* meet basic standards of reproducibility...

⚠️ Six-year position at our department - work in lovely Vienna with a friendly team, 2 classes a term, and follow/develop your own research agenda. Feel free to ask me questions you might have. Deadline 24/01/25 jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Universi...

✨Time for meta reflection✨ In this forum, @jmcquarterly.bsky.social @docmattweber.bsky.social and I invited colleagues to discuss the pros & cons of standardization in Computational Communication Science, and the tension between innovation, rigor & inclusion. 🧵 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Excited to hear all your proposals! We want to hear both from seasoned computational veterans and those taking their first methodological steps, all welcome!