Research
At the center of this research is one overarching question: How can we understand and shape the relationship between humans, technology, and society in an increasingly data-driven and AI-mediated world?
Digital technologies have become deeply embedded in how societies communicate, produce knowledge, make decisions, remember the past, and exercise power. Social media platforms and artificial intelligence do not simply provide new tools for human interaction. They change the structures within which interaction takes place and increasingly shape what people see, know, and do.
At the Chair of Computational Social Science, we study these large and dynamic socio-technical systems and their consequences for individuals and society. Our research combines computational methods with social and political theory to understand both human behavior in digital environments and the technological systems that structure these environments.
A central focus of our research is the relationship between information and democracy. We investigate how information and disinformation are produced, distributed, and perceived; how algorithms and platforms transform the public sphere; and how phenomena such as online misogyny, gender-based disinformation, polarization, and information overload affect democratic communication. Rather than treating information and disinformation simply as binary categories, we are interested in the broader information environments in which people form opinions, establish trust, and make political judgments. Current work combines political theory with computational analysis to develop an empirically grounded understanding of democratic information resilience.
A second research focus concerns AI, power, and human agency. As increasingly powerful AI systems are developed and controlled by a small number of technology companies, new questions arise about the distribution of power between individuals, corporations, governments, and democratic institutions. We study what happens when knowledge production, communication, and decision-making are increasingly mediated or delegated to AI systems, and how transparency, accountability, contestability, and democratic sovereignty can be maintained.
Our research also examines how digital technologies transform the ways societies understand themselves and their past. This includes the digital construction of history and collective memory, the emergence of new forms of historical communication on social media, and the changing roles of institutions, creators, algorithms, and audiences in determining how history becomes visible and meaningful.
Across these areas, we are interested not only in identifying risks. Digital technologies can enable new forms of participation, access to knowledge, research, and social coordination. A recurring question across our work is therefore: How can digital technologies be designed and governed in ways that strengthen rather than diminish human agency and democratic societies?
Methodological Innovation
Answering these questions requires methodological innovation. We work with large and heterogeneous data sources ranging from social media posts, images, videos, and networks to laws, political speeches, parliamentary debates, historical documents, and policy texts. Our methodological toolbox includes social network analysis, quantitative and qualitative text analysis, statistical modeling, machine learning, Large Language Models, and multimodal computational methods.
At the same time, we critically examine the methods and data we use. Social media data are not neutral representations of society, algorithms introduce new forms of selection and bias, and AI-based methods create their own problems of validity, transparency, and reproducibility. Methodological research is therefore an integral part of our substantive research.
Our work is fundamentally interdisciplinary, bringing together computational social science, computer science, political science, sociology, history, and other fields. Through international collaboration and cooperation with societal partners, we aim to connect methodological innovation with some of the fundamental questions facing digital societies.