Guest Speaker - Nick Hagar

November 9, 2022

"Complexity in the Digital News Media Ecosystem" # Abstract Structures drive the macro-level characteristics we observe in digital news media. Complex interactions among news production, distribution, and consumption create emergent structural pressures, shaping the system as a whole in unpredictable ways. In this work, I aim to highlight consequential emergent characteristics in familiar news processes. I argue that blending communication theory with complexity science provides a powerful analytic lens, revealing novel explanations for long-observed behaviors in journalists, platforms, and audiences. Using a case study of news dissemination on TikTok, I further explore the implications of this complexity framework for designing real-world platform interventions. # Bio Nick Hagar is a PhD candidate in the Computational Journalism Lab at Northwestern University. He researches collective attention problems on digital platforms, with a focus on news media. His current projects include auditing news prevalence on TikTok and developing a framework for robust sampling of digital news archives. He recently completed research internships at Patreon and Meta Core Data Science.

Guest Speaker - Dr. Janaki Srinivasan

October 19, 2022

“The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India”

Abstract

Information has fundamentally reshaped development discourse and practice. This talk will examine the political implications ofthe ideaof informationfor poverty alleviation. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on threecases from India—the circulation of price information in a fish market in Kerala, government information in information kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan—the talk will counter claims that information is naturally and universally empowering. It will demonstrate, instead, how the definition, production, and leveraging of information are alwaysbeen shapedby caste, class, and gender.

Bio

Janaki Srinivasan is associate professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB) and the convenerof the Institute’s Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP). Her research examines the politics of information technology-based development. Currently, she is exploring privacy, algorithmic control and fairness in platform work. Janaki earned her Ph.D. from the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Guest Speaker - Michael Reiss

October 12, 2022

"Challenges to investigating online news consumption and online news avoidance using computational methods" # Abstract A growing availability of digital behavioral data as well as an increase in computing power has made many online phenomena accessible for quantitative study. This also applies to online news consumption and the avoidance thereof. A first part of this talk will present such an inquiry, covering the systematic investigation of non-use of online news by combining tracking and automated text classification. Relying on tracking data of Swiss Internet users, two computational approaches were applied to identify news consumption at the domain and article level. This led to a precise picture of Swiss online news use and on the extent of non-users of online news. A special focus is on the methodical aspects of the work. Building on these insights, a second part of the talk goes beyond the article and discusses implications and challenges for the current research of news consumption as well as limitations to computational methods in the context of researching news consumption online.
# Bio Michael Reiss has been a PhD candidate in the Media Change & Innovation Division at the Department of Communication and Media Research, University of Zurich (Switzerland) since September 2018. Previously he completed the master’s programs Socio-Ecological Economics and Policy at the Vienna University of Economics (Austria) and Social Research Methods at the London School of Economics and Political Science (United Kingdom). Currently he is engaged in a Swiss National Science Foundation research project on algorithmic selection in everyday life. His research interests involve news consumption and methods of computational social science.