What is it about computational communication science?

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks with Sarah Jewett from the London School of Economics and Political Science about the challenges of working with traumatic and high-stakes data in computational social science.
Sarah’s research examines how defendants accused of war crimes express remorse—if at all—across legal archives, and what patterns of emotional expression emerge over time. The discussion focuses on the ethical and methodological tensions that arise when applying computational text analysis to testimony describing extreme violence and trauma.
Drawing on her own research journey, Sarah reflects on why “more advanced” methods are not always better, especially when the stakes are high, and argues for simplicity, care, and greater human involvement when analyzing sensitive data.
Contact Sarah at: S.Jewett1@lse.ac.uk

In this episode, Prof. Anja Bechmann from Aarhus University guides us through the complex legal and ethical landscape of working with digital trace data in social media research. She explains the challenges researchers face around data access and compliance, especially given the evolving regulations like the Digital Services Act. Anja shares practical advice for navigating these issues responsibly, including how early-career researchers can find support and make use of emerging tools and datasets. This conversation offers clear, actionable guidance for conducting digital media research the right way.

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks with Larri Miller (she/her, they/them), a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 
The conversation centres on Larri’s dissertation research, which combines computational analysis grounded in qualitative methods. We discuss their study “Defending the Status Quo: Exploring r/TrueUnpopularOpinion as a Defensive Public” and what it reveals about how online communities mobilise discourse to resist social change and protect dominant viewpoints.
This episode offers insights into computational grounded theory, mixed-methods research design, and the challenges of studying contentious online spaces.
Learn more about Larri’s work: https://www.larrimiller.com/ Get in touch with Larri via email: larrisamille@umass.edu

In this episode, Professor Hartmut Wessler from the University of Mannheim unpacks the evolving role of theory in Computational Communication Science (CCS). Hartmut explains why strong theoretical frameworks remain essential for making sense of complex data and how computational theories differ from traditional approaches in communication research. He also shares which theories he finds most compelling right now and how his work blends text and image analysis to tackle big societal questions like climate change and migration. We discuss whether today’s theories need to evolve to keep pace with new data-driven methods — and why theory, far from fading, is more crucial than ever for guiding meaningful, responsible research in the age of big data.

In this episode of the #aBitOfCCS Podcast, Jana Bernhard-Harrer talks to Miriam Milzner and Daniel Thiele from the Weizenbaum Institute’s research group on the Dynamics of Digital Mobilisation about detecting coordinated online manipulation in the era of generative AI.
They introduce coorsim, an open-source R package that identifies semantically similar coordinated posting—addressing a key limitation of traditional tools that rely on identical or near-identical text. Evaluated across 15 international influence operations, coorsim demonstrates how embedding-based similarity and coordination-sensitive clustering can uncover sophisticated campaigns, even when content is linguistically diverse. The episode also explores an example of coordinated activity during the climate summits COP26 and COP27, drawing on over 5.8 million tweets. Miriam and Daniel reflect on how coordinated campaigns shape climate debates—and what this means for research on disinformation in the age of LLMs.
GitHub Repository: https://github.com/thieled/coorsimEmail
Miriam: miriam.milzner@fu-berlin.deEmail
Daniel: daniel.thiele@fu-berlin.de