Let's put on your legal suit and join Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) welcoming Natali Helberger (Distinguished Professor of Law & Digital Technology, with a special focus on AI at the U of Amsterdam). We talk about the difficulties that come with regulating newly emerging technology. We also talk about all kinds of upcoming EU regulations (such as the Digital Services Act, DSA, the Digital Markets Act, DMA, and the AI Act) and the challenges of these, but also about the differences to other jurisdictional systems. Finally, we put this into perspective of CCS, talking about what will likely change in the new future for researchers (take-home message: a lot!).

In this episode, Emese Domahidi (Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) talk to Ágnes Emőke Horvát (Assistant Professor in Communication and Computer Science at Northwestern University where she leads the Lab on Innovation, Networks, and Knowledge, LINK) about what gender biases are, their origins and how prevalent these systematic misrepresantions are. Moving to Computational Communication Science, we then discuss how gender biases (and inequalities, more generally) affect our research, our data, tools, measures, and models. And we tackle the big question how potential routes forward could look like.

How to measure racism in news media is the main question in today's episode. Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam looks into racist and discriminative language as well as dynamics of racism in some 30 years of German-speaking news media. As that's quite a lot of data, of course Ahrabhi also builds on CCS methods. Yet, in addition to the mere amount of data, coding racism also bears big questions of validity and ethics for coders and annotators -- an issue where CCS might also be able to help. In this episode hosted by Jana Bernhard, Ahrabhi talks us through dictionaries and the many options to construct and validate dictionaries in this area. Her research is part of her PhD project about which she is happily reachable via [email protected]. Also, some results were presented at the 2023 ICA in Toronto. Oh, and if you want to guest or host a future episode, please don't hesitate reaching out to us.

Today's CCS study is about the application and particularly the development of dictionaries to apply to quantitative text analyses. Anke Stoll (together with Lena Wilms and Marc Ziegele in this publication from 2023) developed a dictionary to detect German incivility. She did so through a combination of manual and automated approaches, through classic word lists and word embeddings. Hosted by Emese Domahidi, Anke takes us through her approach, the challenges, and of course the potentials she sees with these kinds of techniques. The journal article was just published in Communication Methods and Measures. Oh, and if you want to guest or host a future episode, please don't hesitate reaching out to us.

In today's episode, Frederic R. Hopp (⁠@Freddy_Hopp) discusses with Emese Domahidi (⁠@MissEsi⁠) and Mario Haim (⁠@DrFollowMario⁠) about morality. What's that, why does it affect our daily lifes and our social cohesion, what does it have to do with media content, and how can it be measured? CCS research offers a wide variety of tools to handle morality but also comes with quite a lot of challenges. Freddy takes us through them and discusses with us how research on morality is also affected by current societal developments.