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The many faces of GESIS

Viehmann, Dr. Christina
Computational Social Science
Transparent Social Analytics
 Team lead

+49 (0221) 47694-739
Christina•Viehmann[at]gesis•org
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Vita

Christina Viehmann studied communication science, political science, and macroeconomics. She obtained her doctoral deegree in 2019 from the Department of Communication at the University of Mainz. From 2013 to 2023, she was a research assistant at the Department of Communication. In the summer term of 2023, she served as a visiting professor for Communication Science at the Department of Social Sciences at the Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf. In October 2023, she joined the Gesis Computational Social Science Department as a postdoc. In March 2025, Christina took on the role of a team lead for the Transparent Social Analaytics team.

Service

Christina is working on the developmentof a new platform that will be a repository of computational methods and learning resources for social scientists.

Research

In her research, Christina is concerned with questions from political communication: In her dissertation, she investigated how political decision makers nagivate media pressure when engaging in political negotiations. Beyond elites, Christina is interested in the role of public communication in major societal crises and in the societal effects of digital media environments, for example how digital communication shapes societal cohesion or drives polarization among society. In particular, how computational methods can help to answer these research questions, is at the heart of her research focus. In particular, the application of NLP approaches to measure sophisticated theoretical concepts extends her research interests on the methodological side.

Her research was published in Communication Methods & Measures, Journal of Communication, Journalism Studies, International Journal of Press/Politics, and International Journal of Public Opinion Research.

Publications

Journal article

Geiß, Stefan, Christina Viehmann, and Conor A Kelly. 2025. "Inflation of crisis coverage? Tracking and explaining the changes in crisis labeling and crisis news wave salience 1785–2020." Journal of Communication 75 (1): 27–41. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqae033.

Schultz, Tanjev, Nikolaus Jackob, Miriam Rüdesheim, Marc Ziegele, Christina Viehmann, Daniel Stegmann, Christian Schemer, Oliver Quiring, Ilka Jakobs, and Nayla Fawzi. 2025. "Lauter Lügen und Fake News? Misstrauen in die Medien und die Wahrnehmung von Desinformation und Verschwörungstheorien." Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 75 (39): 4-11. https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/propaganda-und-desinformation-2025/570919/lauter-luegen-und-fake-news/.

Fawzi, Nayla, Marc Ziegele, Tanjev Schultz, Nikolaus Jackob, Ilka Jakobs, Christina Viehmann, Oliver Quiring, Christian Schemer, and Daniel Stegmann. 2025. "Stabiles Medienvertrauen auch in Zeiten politischer Umbrüche: Mainzer langzeitstudie Medienvertrauen 2024." Media Perspektiven (13): 1-20.

Quiring, Oliver, Marc Ziegele, Tanjev Schultz, Nayla Fawzi, Nikolaus Jackob, Ilka Jakobs, Christian Schemer, Daniel Stegmann, and Christina Viehmann. 2024. "Zurück zum Niveau vor der Pandemie – Konsolidierung von Vertrauen und Misstrauen: Mainzer Langzeitstudie Medienvertrauen 2023." Media-Perspektiven 2024 (9): 1-14. https://www.ard-media.de/fileadmin/user_upload/media-perspektiven/pdf/2024/MP_9_2024_Mainzer_Langzeitstudie_Medienvertrauen_2023.pdf.

Viehmann, Christina, Tilman Beck, Marcus Maurer, Oliver Quiring, and Iryna Gurevych. 2023. "Investigating Opinions on Public Policies in Digital Media: Setting up a Supervised Machine Learning Tool for Stance Classification." Communication Methods and Measures 17 (2): 150-184. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2022.2151579.

Jakobs, Ilka, Nikolaus Jackob, Tanjev Schultz, Marc Ziegele, Oliver Quiring, Nayla Fawzi, Christian Schemer, Daniel Stegmann, and Christina Viehmann. 2023. "Medienvertrauen in Krisenzeiten. Der öffentlich-rechtliche Rundfunk im Kontext aktueller gesellschaftlicher Entwicklungen." Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 73 (25/2023): 34-41.

Schultz, Tanjev, Marc Ziegele, Nikolaus Jackob, Christina Viehmann, Ilka Jakobs, Nayla Fawzi, Oliver Quiring, Christian Schemer, and Daniel Stegmann. 2023. "Medienvertrauen nach Pandemie und "Zeitenwende": Mainzer Langzeitstudie Medienvertrauen 2022."

Viehmann, Christina, Marc Ziegele, and Oliver Quiring. 2022. "Communication, Cohesion, and Corona: The Impact of People’s Use of Different Information Sources on their Sense of Societal Cohesion in Times of Crises." Journalism Studies 23 (5-6): 629-649. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2021.1965907.

Jakobs, Ilka, Tanjev Schultz, Christina Viehmann, Oliver Quiring, Nikolaus Jackob, Marc Ziegele, and Christian Schemer. 2021. "Medienvertrauen in Krisenzeiten: Mainzer Langzeitstudie Medienvertrauen 2020." MediaPerspektiven 2021 (3): 152-162.

Weber, Mathias, Christina Viehmann, Marc Ziegele, and Christian Schemer. 2020. "Online hate does not stay online–how implicit and explicit attitudes mediate the effect of civil negativity and hate in user comments on prosocial behavior." Computers in Human Behavior 104: . doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.106192.

Köhler, Christina, and Pablo Jost. 2019. "Revealing the Hybrid Patterns: Conflict Coverage as a Product of a Commercial and a Normative Media Logic." The International Journal of Press/Politics 24 (2): 233-253. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161218821802.

Köhler, Christina, and Mathias Weber. 2018. "Do I really need to help?!” Perceived severity of cyberbullying, victim blaming, and bystanders’ willingness to help the victim." Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 12 (4): Article 4. doi: https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2018-4-4.

Köhler, Christina, Mathias Weber, and Oliver Quiring. 2018. "I Want a Savior, Not a Victim. The Impact of Media Representations of the EU and Economic Shocks on Citizens’ Supportive Attitudes on the European Integration." International Journal of Public Opinion Research 31 (1): 45–69. doi: https://doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edx023.

Ziegele, Marc, Christina Köhler, and Mathias Weber. 2018. "Socially destructive? Effects of negative and hateful user comments on readers’ donation behavior toward refugees and homeless persons." Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 62 (4): 636–653. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2018.1532430.

Weber, Mathias, Christina Köhler, and Anna Schnauber-Stockmann. 2018. "Why Should I Help You? Man Up! Bystanders’ Gender Stereotypic Perceptions of a Cyberbullying Incident." Deviant Behavior 40 (5): 1-17. doi: https://doi.org/10.1080/01639625.2018.1431183.

Weber, Mathias, and Christina Köhler. 2017. "Illusions of knowledge: Media exposure and citizens’ perceived political competence." International Journal of Communication (11): 2387–2410.

Chapter in an edited book

Beck, Tilman, Bela Bohlender, Christina Viehmann, Vincent Hane, Yanik Adamson, Jaber Khuri, Jonas Brossmann, Jonas Pfeiffer, and Iryna Gurevych. 2022. "AdapterHub Playground: Simple and Flexible Few-Shot Learning with Adapters." In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations, edited by Association for Computational Lingustics, 61–75. doi: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.acl-demo.6.

Presentation at a conference

Viehmann, Christina, and Stefan Geiß. 2025. "Automated Detection and Labelling of News Waves (AutoWave): Demonstration and Validation for News Coverage About Crises Between 1785 and 2020." 75th Annual International Communication Association Conference, 2025-06-15.

Bleier, Arnim, Chung-hong Chan, Po-Chun Chang, Raniere Gaia Costa da Silva, Stefan Dietze, Susmita Gangopadhyay, Muhammad Taimoor Khan, Brigitte Mathiak, Fakhri Momeni, Christina Viehmann, and Claudia Wagner. 2025. "Enabling Reproducible and User-Friendly Computational Tools for Social Science: The Methods Hub Initiative." Metascience Conference 2025, 2025-07-01.

Viehmann, Christina, Nayla Fawzi, Nikolaus Jackob, Ilka Jakobs, Oliver Quiring, Christian Schemer, Tanjev Schultz, Daniel Stegmann, and Marc Ziegele. 2025. "Journalist:innen – Menschen wie du und ich!? Zur konzeptionellen Natur von publikumsseitigen Repräsentationserwartungen an die Medien." 70. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 2025-03-20.

Viehmann, Christina, and Chung-hong Chan. 2025. "Methods Hub – An Open-Source Tool Repository and Learning Resource for Computational Methods in the Social Sciences." 75th Annual International Communication Association Conference, 2025-06-15.

Gruber, Johannes B., Christina Viehmann, Aleksandra Urman, Valerie Hase, Daniel Thiele, Fabienne Lind, Damian Trilling, Samia Touileb, Sjoerd Stolwijk, Roksana Gloc, Kinga Adamczewska, Felicia Loecherbach, Srdjan Vesic, Agnieszka Hess, Cengiz Erisen, Edlira Gugu, Serap Durmus Ozturk, Aleksandar Tomašević, Tilman Beck, Bruno Yun, Tonja Jerele, Chaya Liebeskind, and Kasper Welbers. 2025. "Textual Feelings: A Review of Computational Tools for Measuring Opinions in Text." COMPTEXT 2025, Vienna , 2025-04-25.