Background

I am a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of Language, Literature and Communication Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam working on the NEWSFLOWS project (the project was recently moved to the VU). Previously, I worked at the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam within the OPTED project and a focus on text as data methods and creating open source software tools to make these methods easily accessible and reproducible. Before that, I worked as Post-Doc Researcher at the Chair for Digital Democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS), European University Viadrina Foundation Frankfurt (Oder). In 2021, I passed my PhD in Politics at the University of Glasgow.

In my PhD project, I scrutinised how the media in the UK portrays protest events. Most literature about the topic assumes that the messages of protests are delegitimised by the media through routinised framing, i.e. a focus on disruption by and deviance of protesters. In my project, I collected all newspaper articles published in selected UK newspaper outlets that mention a protest in the UK over a 26 year period (1992-2017; N > 27,000) and analysed the content using an innovative approach to framing analysis that combines best-practice manual coding techniques with supervised machine learning.

After a detour that included a Master on Political Theory, I realised during my Master in Political Communication — which was originally planned as a semester abroad — how much I love working with data. Especially R, the free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, is captivating much of my attention nowadays and has helped me to combine my two most long-standing passions: Political Science and fiddling with computers. I’m using R to do nearly everything (including writing my thesis and this website).