Principal Investigators
| Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He was formerly Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (Sweden). He completed his PhD about Max Weber at the LSE in 1988. His publications include Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is also the author of ‘An Age of Limits: Social Theory for the 21st Century’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and, with Eric T. Meyer, of ‘Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities’ (MIT Press 2015). His most recent book is 'Social Theory after the Internet' and he is also working on big data in the social sciences. Ralph Schroeder published his work in Information Communication and Society, International Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Big Data & Society and Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication among others. Ralph Schroeder's home page link. | ||
| Assistant Professor in Political Science/e-politics at Sciences Po, Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE). She is also an affiliate researcher to the Center for Research on Extremism (C-REX; University of Oslo). Before joining the CEE, Caterina was a VOX-Pol Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (2016-2017) and subsequently (2017-2018) an assistant professor in political science/European politics at the European School of Political and Social Sciences (ESPOL-Lille). Caterina’s research interests are broadly in European politics, with a special emphasis on political parties, agenda-setting dynamics, e-politics, right-wing extremism, radicalism and populism. Since 2016 she is joint convenor of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism & Democracy. Caterina is also working on a project funded by VOX-Pol that examines nationalistic discourses of contemporary European far right organisations online. The second (funded by the VolkswagenStiftung in partnership with the Oxford Internet Institute and GESIS) examines online communication of the so-called populist parties, their grievances and audience exposure to these complaints in Europe and the US. Caterina Froio published her work in Perspectives on Politics, Comparative European Politics, European Journal of Political Research, and Party Politics among others. Caterina Froio's home page link. |  | |
| He did his doctoral studies in a graduate school in Heidelberg and participated in several projects related to internet regulation and online political communication at the Institute of Political Science. Stier uses theoretical approaches and methods from Political Communication and Computational Social Science. In particular, he studies how political parties, protest movements and civil society organisations use the internet in political communication. Furthermore, Stier investigates from a comparative politics perspective how political institutions shape online political communication and Internet policy. He is part of the Team Social Analytics and Services in the Department Computational Social Science. He relies on digital trace data in his own research and provides services regarding the usage of digital trace data by social scientists. Sebastian Stier published his work in Political Communication, Information, Communication & Society, and Democratization among others. Sebastian Stier's home page link. |  | |
Nora Kirkizh | Nora Kirkizh joined the Department of Computational Social Science at GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Scienes in October 2018. She recently graduated from the University of Mannheim with MA degree in Political Science. While studying in Mannheim, she was also working as a research assistant at the Center for European Social Research (MZES) under the supervision of Prof. Nikolay Marinov. Her interests include media and politics, communication and experiments. Specifically, her recent work examines the effects of foreign state propaganda on politics in democracies. Earlier, Nora studied quantitative social analysis at the Higher School of Economics in Russia, and worked for the Internet Studies Lab. She graduated with the Specialist Diploma from Saint Petersburg State University, having majored in media studies and journalism. She also worked for Russian media outlets and a Russian tech-company Yandex. |  |