Concluded PhD Projects

Azade Esther Kakavand: The Networked Counterpublics of the Far-Right – Exploring Connections on and Across Social Media

Concluded in September 2025
Supervisor(s): Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti
Funding/Project: CCL

• Related study: Far-Right Social Media Communication in the Light of Technology Affordances: A Systematic Literature Review, Annals of the International Communication Association, 48 (1), 37–56.

Aytalina Kulichkina: Dynamics of Political Protest and Repression on Social Media

Concluded in June 2025
Supervisor(s): Annie Waldherr, Nicola Righetti
Funding/Project: CCL 

• Related study: Protest and repression on social media: Pro-Navalny and pro-government mobilization dynamics and coordination patterns on Russian Twitter. New Media & Society, 27(9), 5433-5454.

Noelle Lebernegg: The Role of Media in the Misinformation Society

Concluded in June 2025
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden
Project/Funding: CCL, Knowledge Resistance: Knowledge, Consequences, and Cure­ 

• Related study: Do You Speak Disinformation? Computational Detection of Deceptive News-Like Content Using Linguistic and Stylistic Features. Digital Journalism, 1–24. 

Dominika Betakova: I Do Not (Want to) Know! Political News Use in Fragmented Media Environments

Concluded in June 2025
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden, Sophie Lecheler
Funding/Project: CCL, PolCom

• Related Study: I Do Not (Want To) Know! The Relationship Between Intentional News Avoidance and Low News Consumption. Mass Communication and Society, 28(3), 413–440.
• Related Study: The Role of Choice Architecture in Mitigating News Avoidance. Digital Journalism, 1–19. 

Jana Bernhard-Harrer: Multiple voices in democratic discourse: Keeping up with professional political communication

Concluded in February 2025
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden
Funding/Project: digitize!

• Related Study: Topic Model Validation Methods and their Impact on Model Selection and Evaluation. Computational Communication Research, 5(1), 2023
• Related Study: Beyond standardization: a comprehensive review of topic modeling validation methods for computational social science research. Poltiical Science Research & Methods, 2025

­Annika Ahrens-Schwabe: The influence of digital reading devices on fictional literature reading

Concluded in November 2023
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden
Funding/Project: Books on Screen

• Related Study: Experiencing literature on the e‐reader: The effects of reading narrative texts on screen, Journal of Research in Reading, online first (2021).
• Related Study: Literatur am Bildschirm - Zum Stand der empirischen Leseforschung. Orbis Litterarum 75(5), 213-229 (2020). 

Alina Nikolaou: The Persuasive Effect of Immersive Virtual Environments on Attitudes

Concluded in June 2023
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden, Sophie Lecheler
Funding/Project: uni:docs Fellowship for Doctoral Students of the University of Vienna

• Related study: Changing social attitudes with virtual reality: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Annals of the International Communication Association 46(1), 30-61 (2022).

Tobias Heidenreich: Mapping European Migration Discourses on Social Media

Concluded in September 2021
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden, Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Funding/Project: REMINDER, Tango on a Tightrope

• Related Study: Media Framing Dynamics of the ‘European Refugee Crisis’: A Comparative Topic Modelling Approach. Journal of Refugee Studies 32(1), i172-i182 (2019).
• Related Study: Political migration discourses on social media: a comparative perspective on visibility and sentiment across political Facebook accounts in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46(7), 1261-1280 (2020).
• Related Study: Political elites' migration discourses on social media. In: Media and Public Attitudes Toward Migration in Europe - A Comparative Approach (eds. J.Strömbäck, C. E. Meltzer, J.-M- Eberl, C. Schemer, H.G. Boomgaarden); Routledge (2021).
• Related Study: Discontentment trumps Euphoria: Interacting with European Politicians’ migration-related messages on social media. New Media and Society, online first (2022).

Fabienne Lind: Multilingual Computer-Assisted Content Analysis

Concluded in June 2021
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden, Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Funding/Project: REMINDER, MIRROR, OPTED, Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes

• Related study: When the Journey Is as Important as the Goal: A Roadmap to Multilingual Dictionary Construction. International Journal of Communication 13, 4000-4020 (2019).
• Related study: Now you see me, now you don’t: applying automated content analysis to track migrant women’s salience in German news. Feminist Media Studies 21(6), 923-940 (2021).
• Related Study: Building the Bridge: Topic Modelling for Comparative Research. Communication Measures and Methods, online first (2021).
• Related Study: Greasing the Wheels for Comparative Communication Research: Supervised Text Classification for Multilingual Corpora. Computational Communication Research, online first (2021). 

Esther Greussing: "Looking, clicking, learning? Knowledge effects of textual, visual and interactive elements in science-related online news"

Concluded in December 2020
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden
Funding: uni:docs Stipend

• Related Study: Promises and Pitfalls: Taking a Closer Look at How Interactive Infographics Affect Learning From News. International Journal of Communication 15, 3336-3357 (2021).
• Related Study: Simply Bells and Whistles? Cognitive Effects of Visual Aesthetics in Digital Longforms. Digital Journalism 7(2), 273-293 (2019).
• Related Study: Learning From Science News via Interactive and Animated Data Visualizations: An Investigation Combining Eye Tracking, Online Survey, and Cued Retrospective Reporting. Science Communication 42(6), 803–828 (2020).
• Related Study: Powered by Immersion? Examining Effects of 360-Degree Photography on Knowledge Acquisition and Perceived Message Credibility of Climate Change News. Environmental Communication 14(3), 316-331 (2020). 

Petro Tolochko: Determining Political Text Complexity

Concluded in June 2019
Supervisor(s): Hajo Boomgaarden; Hyunjin Song
Funding/Project: CCL

• Related Study: Determining Political Text Complexity: Conceptualizations, Measurements, and Application. International Journal of Communication 13, 1784–1804 (2019)
• Related Study: Analysis of Linguistic Complexity in Professional and Citizen Media. Journalism Studies 19(12), 1786-1803 (2018).
• Related Study: “That Looks Hard!”: Effects of Objective and Perceived Textual Complexity on Factual and Structural Political Knowledge. Political Communication 36(4), 609-628 (2019).
• Related Study: What you expect is (not) what you get: the impact of initial and post-hoc judgments of message characteristics on political information recall. Media Psychology 25(1), 128-154 (2022).