So the "That's not a knoife, THIS is a knoife" country (🇦🇺) confiscated my nail clippers and a metal credit card with a sharp edge, while Christchurch Airport security took a look at my accidentally hand-luggaged Swiss Army knife and went: "Yeah, nah, she'll be right, mate. Blade's within limits." 😅

🔐 MEDem AmCAT tackles a different problem: much of the news and platform content we study cannot be openly shared because of copyright, privacy or licensing rules. AmCAT supports controlled access and analysis without distributing protected material.

We often don't know which data, media sources or analytical tools already exist, let alone whether we can access, share the access, and thus make the data reusable. In our new open-access paper, we explain how @medem.bsky.social aims to change that. 🧵

Monitoring Electoral Democracy: Discovering and Reusing Text and Multimedia Data for Political Communication Research | Article | Media and Communication

Jakob-Moritz Eberl, Jana Bernhard-Harrer, Mariken van der Velden, Sofia Gil Clavel, Paul Balluff, Johannes B. Gruber, Noëlle S. Lebernegg, Kasper Welbers, Marvin Stecker, Claes Holger de Vreese, Woute...

doi.org

If `coffee = productivity` I was extremly productive during my time at QUT in Brisbane.

Dear publishers: just give me the damn pdf, I don't care about your stupid reader

🔍 How robust are findings based on topic modeling? Our 🏆 Top Faculty Award article on #TopicModeling + #MultiverseAnalysis is now #openaccess in Communication Methods & Measures. 📄 doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2026.2714769 🔁 gesistsa.github.io/multiverse_tm/ wonderful teamwork @gesis.org 👇

Beyond beyond standardization: studying robustness of empirical claims based on topic modeling through multiverse analysis

While topic modeling is widely used, some scholars have already announced that the application of topic modeling in social science research is impossible to standardize. Meanwhile, researchers have...

doi.org

Alright, let's give this paper a final read before resubmitting it 🤗

Shoutout to @m-dot-brown.bsky.social, @orangechair.org , Gabe Maldoff, @solmg.bsky.social, @zevesanderson.com, & @michaelzimmer.bsky.social for this excellent work. I used it to completely revamp the implications section in my web scraping course and I find myself citing it.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

journals.sagepub.com

I needed to come to Brisbane to see people being good at riding e-scooters. I wasn't even aware such a thing existed. But quite often I see people in groups casually doing a wheelie here. And just now, someone drifted around a corner at full speed on a lime. Pretty wild.

Many people misjudge how many migrants actually live in their community and how well they are integrated. Berbée, Brinkmann, Gallegos Torres, Lange, Naumann, Sommerfeld, Perceptions of migration and integration in Germany: The role of regional context and migrants’ origin, doi.org/10.1093/pnas...

New #rstats 📦: mediacloud2 (happy about name recommendations). Since the exitsting R packages were stale and I needed data, I wrote a new package. MediaCloud is an amazing resource for getting news media data, especially if you rehydrate the articles (e.g., through paperboy).

To prepare for this talk, I created an entire R package (with an actual purpose) from scratch in less than 8 hours (would have been less without the meetings in between). Let's see how it does while I'm using it for work today.

MZES Social Science Data Lab@mzes-ssdl.bsky.social · 2mo ago

▶️ Social Science Data Lab: Fall 2026 Events Four input talks by great researchers (see below ⤵️)! 🗓️ Details & Zoom: socialsciencedatalab.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/page/events/ 👥 Organizers: @rubac.bsky.social, @denis-cohen.bsky.social, Nadia Granato and Alexander Wenz

▶️ Social Science Data Lab: Fall 2026 Events Four input talks by great researchers (see below ⤵️)! 🗓️ Details & Zoom: socialsciencedatalab.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/page/events/ 👥 Organizers: @rubac.bsky.social, @denis-cohen.bsky.social, Nadia Granato and Alexander Wenz

Right after my last post I see this. Absolutely. I also hate how AI is shoved in my face constantly. There are a few tasks at which it is great, and a million where I don't need or want AI and I especially hate that everything is called Gemini or Copilot now.

Tom Scocca@tomscocca.bsky.social · 2mo ago

It's OK at doing code for you? Great. What does that have to do with how it keeps popping up to demand to rewrite a paragraph that's already written and edited?

Qwen3.8 27B comes extremely close to Claude in programming tasks. It's been said, but I wanted to share a test I ran in #rstats for {paperboy} 📦. TLDR: Qwen in opencode got it done in 28 mins, Claude Code ( Opus 5) got it done in 3.5. Results differ a little, but both are perfect solutions.

rollama 0.3.1 just hit CRAN! 🥳 Highlight of the new version is that it now supports batch annotation of images with structured outputs. Screenshot from the updated vignette below:

CRAN Package Updates Bot@cranberriesfeed.bsky.social · 3mo ago

CRAN updates: rollama #rstats

Had a fantastic warm welcome at @qutdmrc.bsky.social where I'll be spending the next 8 weeks working on CSS and data donation topics with @antmandan.bsky.social and meeting fantastic new people every day so far 🤗

Thanks @adfichter.eurosky.social :) And it was exciting and refreshing to write in a non-academic genre for once! Glad I had the opportunity!

Adrienne Fichter@adfichter.eurosky.social · 3mo ago

Fantastic first piece of @aurman21.bsky.social for @republik.ch: Westliche Tech-Riesen stehen den russischen Zensur­bemühungen nicht im Weg, solange sie nicht rechtlich dazu verpflichtet sind. Und nicht nur das: Sie helfen in manchen Fällen den Behörden sogar dabei www.republik.ch/2026/08/12/u...

*JOB* My group at @gesis.org has an open position: we are looking for a candidate to support the expansion of our Trusted Research Environment for providing access to sensitive research data: gesis.jobs.personio.de/job/2707934?...

Research Infrastructure Specialist (Postdoc) for Trusted Research Environments (DSS-26) | Jobs at GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

GESIS is one of the world's leading social science infrastructure facilities, supporting researchers at all levels of their research projects with expertise and infrastructure services. We help ensure...

gesis.jobs.personio.de

While we are still waiting for the final funding decision (which will be made by the BMFTR) for RIDLOP, we are delighted to see the Wissenschaftsrat's report that was published yesterday. So keeping our fingers crossed for the last steps in the evaluation process!

GESIS - Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften@gesis.org · 4mo ago

#RIDLOP #Wissenschaftsrat #ResearchInfrastructure The German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) supports the implementation of RIDLOP, the Research Infrastructure for Data from Large Online Platforms, in its statement published today.

There is some hype in the world of AI this month and it's about open weight models 😮 Today, Kimi-K3 will be published and on paper, it's head to head with the biggest commercial models. You can't run it (unless you happen to have a supercomputer), but still exciting that you can download it!

moonshotai/Kimi-K3 · Upcoming release · Hugging Face

The latest model from Moonshot AI.

huggingface.co

#RIDLOP #Wissenschaftsrat #ResearchInfrastructure The German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) supports the implementation of RIDLOP, the Research Infrastructure for Data from Large Online Platforms, in its statement published today.

New preprint: my contribution for @marhai.bsky.social and @emesedomahidi.bsky.social 's The Handbook of Computational Communication Research discusses the transition of the field from bag-of-words to word embeddings to transformer based contextualized embeddings. doi.org/10.31235/osf...

If you have any questions about this job, let me know! It is a great opportunity and very important work!

APSA & ICA Political Communication Divisions@polcomm.bsky.social · 4mo ago

📢 Opportunity Alert! Political Communication is hiring a Data Editor to work with the editors-in-chief on ensuring reproducibility and advancing Open Science standards at the journal. 🗓️ Start date: January 1, 2027 Full details at: tinyurl.com/call-dataedi...

Thanks @christinaviehmann.bsky.social, @jbgruber.bsky.social and @gesis.org for the invitation! I had an absolutely fantastic time with many inspiring conversations and new connections with excellent researchers. Thanks for treating me so well, Cologne! #CSS #DSS

Finally back home again, sleeping between my loved ones: my wife, our dog, and our Midea Portasplit 12000 BTU 3.5kW air conditioner 💗

3 conferences in the last 3 weeks done! Was ist too much? Maybe, I'm definitely exhausted. But it was great to see so many colleagues doing new and interesting research, and I feel updated about what's happening in #commsky, data archiving, and #polsky

I read an article in a German newspaper yesterday that passionately argued for age restricting social media. Just a reminder that this is a very stupid idea. pluralistic.net/2026/06/23/d...

#pride26 #pridemonth This Pride Month we want to highlight two very different publications: a practical guide on how to account for gender diversity in evaluation, and a cartoon on what diversity looks like in everyday life. 🔗doi.org/10.31244/zfe... 🎨pushbacklash.eu/wp-c...