Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research (ZEDOE)

Invitation to the final presentation of the Master's research seminars 2024/25 at the Department of Communication Science

(13.01.2025) The final presentation of the Master's research seminars 2024/25 will take place on Thursday, 30 January 2025 from 2-4 p.m. c.t. at Johannisstraße 4, Room JO 101.

In the summer semester of 2024 and the winter semester of 2024/25, the Master's students of communication studies and strategic communication worked on their own research projects in small groups.

A total of ten research projects were created, covering a wide range of topics – from politics and music to AI.

In Prof. Dr. Helena Stehle's seminar, research projects were conducted on delegitimising trade union communication in industrial action using the example of the GDL, on legitimisation strategies of fashion companies regarding social sustainability, on strategies to restore the legitimacy of NGOs, and on discursive delegitimisation strategies on Instagram in election campaigns. Participants in Prof. Dr. Sigrid Kannnengießer's seminar on automated communication researched the use of ChatGPT for political opinion-forming and the anthropomorphisation of ChatGPT by students. As part of the seminar Computational Methods by Prof. Dr. Jakob Jünger, research projects were conducted on gender relations in music, on journalism in the Tor network, on personality profiles on dating platforms and on political radicalisation in language on TikTok.

After the presentation, we would like to toast the results of the research seminars with snacks and drinks.

All interested parties are cordially invited.

Guest researcher Marina Joubert talks about science communication in South Africa

(26.08.2024) From 2 to 13 September, Prof. Marina Joubert from Stellenbosch University in South Africa will be a guest at the Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research (Department of Communication) as part of a fellowship. Marina Joubert is an associate professor of public engagement with science and will be giving a guest lecture on researchers’ participation in science communication.

Following a career of more than 20 years in science communication practice, Joubert joined the university in 2015 to start a new teaching and research program in public communication of science. At Stellenbosch, she is responsible for an extensive education and supervision program and a diverse research portfolio. She serves as deputy editor of the JCOM (Journal of Science Communication) journal and is an honorary lifetime member of the global PCST (Public Communication of Science and Technology) network. Her research focuses on scientists’ roles in public engagement with science and the motivations and challenges that shape their interactions with society. She is also interested in institutional science communication, representations of science in the mass media, and the ethics of science communication.

While she is a visiting fellow at the Department of Communication, Joubert will give a guest lecture on “Scientists’ participation in science communication & public engagement: Insights from South Africa”. The lecture will take place on Thursday, 5 September between 13:00 and 14:30 in room E231. Members of the Department of Communication are warmly invited to attend the lecture.

We warmly welcome Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat as a fellow at the Institute of Communication!

Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat is a researcher at the Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research focuses on the factors that shape communicative spaces: the integration of social interactions with mobile and digital social platforms, with the physical-geographic space. This field opens into a triple research discussion that combines 1) media governance and power, 2) cultural production, communities and identities, and 3) the geopolitics of platforms and communication infrastructures and technologies. Ramon Rodriguez-Amaz uses digital and computational methods to analyse communicative activity in space and place.

He has been invited and participated in research and teaching exchanges in more than ten different universities around Europe including Austria, Germany, France, Spain and Catalunya; and of course, the United Kingdom. As a social scientist, he fights monsters of social injustice, social discrimination and social inequalities reproduced by technologies and by wrong decisions. As a teacher, he finds personal pleasure in learning, in changing the ways of thinking. He says: „Perhaps this explains why I study technology, and why science is for me also a way of creativity more than a Techne, or why I am so terribly scared of monkeys with weapons.“

Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat will be in the department for several weeks in 2023 and 2024. We are looking forward to talking about future research and teaching cooperations.

Project: ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence

The chatbot ChatGPT is able to generate texts that closely resemble human communication. A series of studies on the use of generative AI is being conducted at the center to investigate the diffusion of such applications of generative AI in different fields of application. Insight into the first research results is provided by an interactive graphic, which can be used to explore the diffusion since the start of ChatGPT in November 2022.

About the center

The Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the preconditions, characteristics and characteristics of digitizes public spheres. Analyses are conducted from a social science perspective, in particular a communication science perspective on the mico, meso and macro level. Research also addresses specific (partial) public spheres and their processes of interchange with various societal subsystems (such as politics, economy, science). Innovative theoretical approaches and research methods for digitized communication and accompanying processes or societal changes are developed in this process.
The center’s aims are to bring together the researchers that are engaged in research concerning digitized public spheres at the University of Münster (WWU), to encourage the exchange and the discussion with external researchers and to make the research results fruitful academic teaching.
The aims also include promoting the engagement in public discourses and to strengthen WWU’s profile in this research area, especially in the department of Communication Science.

The operations of the Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research include the following:

• Initiation, planning and coordination of third party projects for (interdisciplinary) research concerning digitized public spheres;
• Organization of symposia, speech and lecture series with the involvement of external researchers;
• Execution of colloquia and courses for professors, scientific staff, PhD students and students and students in order to promote junior researchers;
• Active transfer of knowledge to the general public and to expert and thematic audiences, contact maintenance and -mediation and consulting and mutual exchange of information with national and international organizations.