Digitalization and Society

The lecture series hosts speakers working on digitalization and society, either by using digital methods to study society or by studying the impact of digitalization on society.

The series is supposed to bring together researchers from the WZB working on or being interested in digitalization both as a research subject and as a tool. The invited speakers are doing top-notch research on a wide variety of digitalization issues reflecting the widespread impact of digitalization on all kinds of research and society.

Global Migration of Scholars: Trends, Gender Inequalities, and Patterns with Economic Development

Emilio Zagheni, Head of the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Accelerating comparative research: Strategies for a language and context sensitive multilingual text analysis

Fabienne Lind, Research Associate at the Computational Communication Science Lab at the University of Vienna

Abstract: Dealing with large volumes of multilingual documents, social scientists across disciplines have a common interest in adapting the so popular text-as-data methods for exciting new applications in cross-lingual comparative research. This talk outlines the key challenges for studying social science related concepts in multilingual text collections with automated content analysis methods. By discussing the main methodological strategies for working with multilingual corpora and by presenting a language and context sensitive validation framework, the aim is then to equip researchers with guidance for their next comparative text-as–data research project.

From Filter Bubbles to Fringe Bubbles: The effects of algorithmic news curation on polarization and radicalization

Judith Möller, Associate Professor for Political Communication at the University of Amsterdam