Recently, the project proposal "Inside the filter bubble" was granted in the JEDS call for cross-sectoral scientific challenges by NWO and the eScience Centre. In this project, Laura Hollink (CWI) collaborates with communication scientists at VU and UvA and Computational Linguists at VU to determine the existence and impact of filter bubbles in mobile news consumption. We will collect digital traces of individual news consumption on a mobile phone by means of an app. We will analyse the content of the news articles to extract entities, topics, perspectives and frames. By combining both information sources we can determine not only which articles people read but also which perspectives they are consuming.
This approach fits really well with current work in CWI's Information Access group in the context of the VRE4EIC project: Tessel Bogaard is developing methods and tools to analyse usage logs in a historic news archive, and Astrid van Aggelen is working on NLP for frame detection. 'Inside the Filter Bubble' combines these two research lines.
It is a project with three people funded from the grant: one eScience research engineer will work in the Information Access group on usage analysis and data integration, a second engineer will work on text parsing with the Computation Linguists at VU, and a PhD student will specialise in Communication Science. We are delighted with being granted this project since it strengthens existing informal collaborations and allows us to devote more effort to an already productive partnership.
More information:
