Cornelius Puschmann
Biographic Data
| ID | 336691 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cornelius Puschmann |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cornelius |
| FAMILY NAME | Puschmann |
| SIGNATURE | PUSCHMANN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Bremen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3189-0662 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 91 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Humans and Machines in the Loop: Rethinking LLMS for Conflict and Disagreement in Content Analysis of Social Complex Phenomena
The study of polarization, conflict, and ideological divergence has long challenged scholars across media, communication, and political science. Understanding these phenomena requires engaging with fundamental questions about how opinions are formed, reinforced, and contested in public discourse, and how language and discourses can have so many different meanings and interpretations. Traditional content analysis methods often try to capture this …
Beyond the Black Box: A Multimodal Approach to Understanding In-App Communication
Mobile devices are increasingly central as sources of up-to-date information, making the precise recording of information behavior on these devices more relevant for research. Established methods of automated data collection are reaching their limits when capturing in-app communication, such as political content within social media applications. Based on two case studies, we present two approaches that enable the identification of exposure to rel…
From the Wild West to the Walled Garden: The Evolution of Twitter/X Data Access for Research
Introduction The proliferation of large online platforms has fundamentally reshaped societal processes, from political communication and civic interaction to the mundane organisation of everyday social life (Jungherr et al.). The large volumes of digital traces and interactions generated on these platforms offer researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study both contemporary society and how these digital environments shape it, enabling analys…
All The (Fake) News That’s Fit to Share? News Values in Perceived Misinformation across Twenty-Four Countries
While there is a strong scholarly interest surrounding the content of political misinformation online, much of this research concerns misinformation in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. Although such research has investigated the topical and stylistic characteristics of misinformation, its findings are frequently not interpreted systematically in relation to properties that journalists rely on to capture th…
Transformative Tools, Emerging Challenges: Empirical and Practical Experiences With Large Language Models for Text Classification and Annotation in Communication Studies
Advancements in Large Language Models have been showing important research opportunities within the field of communication studies. It offers the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (Bail, 2023; Chang et al., 2024). Because of its functioning…
How affect shapes online information seeking about political actors
Search engines are both frequently used and widely trusted sources of current political information. While research has examined the different stages of information seeking via search, the question of how political preferences and sociodemographic factors impact political online search has received less attention. In particular, the way in which attitudinal factors, such as sentiment toward a politician or interest in their personal life motivate…
Politicized and Paranoid? Assessing Attitudinal Predictors of Alternative News Consumption
The study of right-wing alternative news sources has moved to the center of scholarly attention recently. Such sources cater to news consumers characterized by extreme political views and mistrust toward mainstream news. However, research into the predictors of alternative news consumption is still scarce. We approach this gap by combining online tracking and survey data from 2,009 German panel participants. We find conspiratorial thinking and pr…
Opening up Data, Tools, and Practices: Collaborating with the Future
Scholars of media and communication never stop emphasizing the importance of journalism in informing the public and in serving as a conduit for critical societal debates. The metaphor of a theater
ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies
The aim of this article is to more precisely define the field of research on the automation of communication, which is still only vaguely discernible. The central thesis argues that to be able to fully grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, our view must be broadened from a preoccupation with direct interactions between humans and machines to societal communication. This more widely targ…
RPC-Lex: A dictionary to measure German right-wing populist conspiracy discourse online
We describe a novel computational dictionary for the study of right-wing populist conspiracy discourse ( RPC) on the internet, specifically in the context of contemporary German politics. After first presenting our definition of conspiracy discourse and grounding it in antecedent research on mediated rhetoric at the intersection of right-wing populism and conspiracy theory, we proceed by outlining our approach to dictionary construction, relying …
Walking Through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts
Twitter continuously tightens the access to its data via the publicly accessible, cost-free standard APIs. This especially applies to the follow network. In light of this, we successfully modified a network sampling method to work efficiently with the Twitter standard API in order to retrieve the most central and influential accounts of a language-based Twitter follow network: the German Twittersphere. We provide evidence that the method is able …
Text as Data for Conflict Research: A Literature Survey
Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) offers exciting new possibilities for conflict research that this contribution describes using a range of exemplary studies from a variety of disciplines including sociology, political science, communication studies, and computer science. The chapter synthesizes empirical research that investigates conflict in relation to text across different formats and genres. This includes both conflict as it is verbalized …
A field comes of age: Tracking research on the internet within communication studies, 1994 to 2018
Since its inception, the internet has been as much technological as social, practical as ideological in character. This article examines academic discourse and asks how research on the multifaceted internet has evolved over the past 25 years. In order to investigate the formation of this academic field, we collected articles published in major academic journals dedicated to new media and digital communication as well as mainstream periodicals in …
Converging on a nativist core? Comparing issues on the Facebook pages of the Pegida movement and the Alternative for Germany
Computational methods offer a new perspective on the evolving agendas of right-wing movements and parties online. This article showcases computational approaches to text analysis (specifically so-called topic models) to diachronically investigate nativist right-wing issues in social media by comparing comments posted on the Facebook page of the Pegida movement to those of the Alternative for Germany. After describing topic modelling as an increas…
An end to the wild west of social media research: A response to Axel Bruns
Current models of data access in social media research offer clear benefits, but are also fraught in a number of ways, including by posing risks to user privacy, being constrained in terms of reliability and reproducibility of results, and incentivizing questionable and in some cases unethical research practices. I argue that partnerships between academics and industry represent one potential option for improving this situation. While no panacea,…
Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit
Understanding how citizens keep themselves informed about current affairs is crucial for a functioning democracy. Extant research suggests that in an increasingly fragmented digital news environment, search engines and social media platforms promote more incidental, but potentially more shallow modes of engagement with news compared to the act of routinely accessing a news organization’s website. In this study, we examine classic predictors of ne…
Setting up crowd science projects
Crowd science is scientific research that is conducted with the participation of volunteers who are not professional scientists. Thanks to the Internet and online platforms, project initiators can draw on a potentially large number of volunteers. This crowd can be involved to support data-rich or labour-intensive projects that would otherwise be unfeasible. So far, research on crowd science has mainly focused on analysing individual crowd science…
Die Zukunft der Kommunikationswissenschaft ist schon da, sie ist nur ungleich verteilt: Eine Kollektivreplik auf Beiträge im „Forum“ (Publizistik, Heft 3 und 4, 2016)
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
Birds of a feather petition together? Characterizing e-petitioning through the lens of platform data
E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both a useful instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they fin…
Alliance of antagonism: Counterpublics and polarization in online climate change communication
Debates around climate change are a prominent example of polarized online communication. We examine the German climate hyperlink network and evaluate the degree to which it is shaped by mainstream and skeptical views. By combining the theoretical frameworks of the networked public sphere and counterpublics, we describe the relation between publics and counterpublics and discuss the role of hyperlinks in delineating communities. Our analysis of bl…
Hashtagging and functional shift: Adaptation and appropriation of the
Analyzing political communication with digital trace data: The role of twitter messages in social science research
"Analyzing political communication with digital trace data: the role of twitter messages in social science research." Information, Communication & Society, 19(12), pp. 1691–1692
The form and function of quoting in digital media
Twitter and Society: Twitter and Society
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Tw…
Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit
Understanding how citizens keep themselves informed about current affairs is crucial for a functioning democracy. Extant research suggests that in an increasingly fragmented digital news environment, search engines and social media platforms promote more incidental, but potentially more shallow modes of engagement with news compared to the act of routinely accessing a news organization’s website. In this study, we examine classic predictors of ne…
Hashtagging and functional shift: Adaptation and appropriation of the
Alliance of antagonism: Counterpublics and polarization in online climate change communication
Debates around climate change are a prominent example of polarized online communication. We examine the German climate hyperlink network and evaluate the degree to which it is shaped by mainstream and skeptical views. By combining the theoretical frameworks of the networked public sphere and counterpublics, we describe the relation between publics and counterpublics and discuss the role of hyperlinks in delineating communities. Our analysis of bl…
ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies
The aim of this article is to more precisely define the field of research on the automation of communication, which is still only vaguely discernible. The central thesis argues that to be able to fully grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, our view must be broadened from a preoccupation with direct interactions between humans and machines to societal communication. This more widely targ…
Converging on a nativist core? Comparing issues on the Facebook pages of the Pegida movement and the Alternative for Germany
Computational methods offer a new perspective on the evolving agendas of right-wing movements and parties online. This article showcases computational approaches to text analysis (specifically so-called topic models) to diachronically investigate nativist right-wing issues in social media by comparing comments posted on the Facebook page of the Pegida movement to those of the Alternative for Germany. After describing topic modelling as an increas…
Die Zukunft der Kommunikationswissenschaft ist schon da, sie ist nur ungleich verteilt: Eine Kollektivreplik auf Beiträge im „Forum“ (Publizistik, Heft 3 und 4, 2016)
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
The form and function of quoting in digital media
All The (Fake) News That’s Fit to Share? News Values in Perceived Misinformation across Twenty-Four Countries
While there is a strong scholarly interest surrounding the content of political misinformation online, much of this research concerns misinformation in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) countries. Although such research has investigated the topical and stylistic characteristics of misinformation, its findings are frequently not interpreted systematically in relation to properties that journalists rely on to capture th…
A field comes of age: Tracking research on the internet within communication studies, 1994 to 2018
Since its inception, the internet has been as much technological as social, practical as ideological in character. This article examines academic discourse and asks how research on the multifaceted internet has evolved over the past 25 years. In order to investigate the formation of this academic field, we collected articles published in major academic journals dedicated to new media and digital communication as well as mainstream periodicals in …
DiPP and eLanguage: Two cooperative models for open access
This article describes the development, deployment and ongoing use of two collaborative platforms for the publication of peer–reviewed, open access, academic e–journals and the different organizational environments towards which each system is tailored. The two projects presented here, DiPP [1] and eLanguage [2], are examples of different approaches to electronic publishing: the first being a regional publishing cooperative, the second a discipli…
Twitter and Society: Twitter and Society
Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Tw…
The form and function of quoting in digital media
Analyzing political communication with digital trace data: The role of twitter messages in social science research
"Analyzing political communication with digital trace data: the role of twitter messages in social science research." Information, Communication & Society, 19(12), pp. 1691–1692
Birds of a feather petition together? Characterizing e-petitioning through the lens of platform data
E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both a useful instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they fin…
Alliance of antagonism: Counterpublics and polarization in online climate change communication
Debates around climate change are a prominent example of polarized online communication. We examine the German climate hyperlink network and evaluate the degree to which it is shaped by mainstream and skeptical views. By combining the theoretical frameworks of the networked public sphere and counterpublics, we describe the relation between publics and counterpublics and discuss the role of hyperlinks in delineating communities. Our analysis of bl…
Hashtagging and functional shift: Adaptation and appropriation of the
Setting up crowd science projects
Crowd science is scientific research that is conducted with the participation of volunteers who are not professional scientists. Thanks to the Internet and online platforms, project initiators can draw on a potentially large number of volunteers. This crowd can be involved to support data-rich or labour-intensive projects that would otherwise be unfeasible. So far, research on crowd science has mainly focused on analysing individual crowd science…
Die Zukunft der Kommunikationswissenschaft ist schon da, sie ist nur ungleich verteilt: Eine Kollektivreplik auf Beiträge im „Forum“ (Publizistik, Heft 3 und 4, 2016)
Turning Words Into Consumer Preferences: How Sentiment Analysis Is Framed in Research and the News Media
Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular instrument for the analysis of social media discourse. Sentiment scores seemingly represent an objective means of assessing the mood of social media users, consumers, and the public at large. Similar to other computational tools, sentiment analysis promises to reduce complexity and mitigate information overload, and to inform the decisions of marketers, pollsters, and scholars with reliable data. This…
An end to the wild west of social media research: A response to Axel Bruns
Current models of data access in social media research offer clear benefits, but are also fraught in a number of ways, including by posing risks to user privacy, being constrained in terms of reliability and reproducibility of results, and incentivizing questionable and in some cases unethical research practices. I argue that partnerships between academics and industry represent one potential option for improving this situation. While no panacea,…
Explaining Online News Engagement Based on Browsing Behavior: Creatures of Habit
Understanding how citizens keep themselves informed about current affairs is crucial for a functioning democracy. Extant research suggests that in an increasingly fragmented digital news environment, search engines and social media platforms promote more incidental, but potentially more shallow modes of engagement with news compared to the act of routinely accessing a news organization’s website. In this study, we examine classic predictors of ne…
Text as Data for Conflict Research: A Literature Survey
Computer-aided text analysis (CATA) offers exciting new possibilities for conflict research that this contribution describes using a range of exemplary studies from a variety of disciplines including sociology, political science, communication studies, and computer science. The chapter synthesizes empirical research that investigates conflict in relation to text across different formats and genres. This includes both conflict as it is verbalized …
A field comes of age: Tracking research on the internet within communication studies, 1994 to 2018
Since its inception, the internet has been as much technological as social, practical as ideological in character. This article examines academic discourse and asks how research on the multifaceted internet has evolved over the past 25 years. In order to investigate the formation of this academic field, we collected articles published in major academic journals dedicated to new media and digital communication as well as mainstream periodicals in …
Converging on a nativist core? Comparing issues on the Facebook pages of the Pegida movement and the Alternative for Germany
Computational methods offer a new perspective on the evolving agendas of right-wing movements and parties online. This article showcases computational approaches to text analysis (specifically so-called topic models) to diachronically investigate nativist right-wing issues in social media by comparing comments posted on the Facebook page of the Pegida movement to those of the Alternative for Germany. After describing topic modelling as an increas…
Walking Through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts
Twitter continuously tightens the access to its data via the publicly accessible, cost-free standard APIs. This especially applies to the follow network. In light of this, we successfully modified a network sampling method to work efficiently with the Twitter standard API in order to retrieve the most central and influential accounts of a language-based Twitter follow network: the German Twittersphere. We provide evidence that the method is able …
RPC-Lex: A dictionary to measure German right-wing populist conspiracy discourse online
We describe a novel computational dictionary for the study of right-wing populist conspiracy discourse ( RPC) on the internet, specifically in the context of contemporary German politics. After first presenting our definition of conspiracy discourse and grounding it in antecedent research on mediated rhetoric at the intersection of right-wing populism and conspiracy theory, we proceed by outlining our approach to dictionary construction, relying …
Opening up Data, Tools, and Practices: Collaborating with the Future
Scholars of media and communication never stop emphasizing the importance of journalism in informing the public and in serving as a conduit for critical societal debates. The metaphor of a theater
ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies
The aim of this article is to more precisely define the field of research on the automation of communication, which is still only vaguely discernible. The central thesis argues that to be able to fully grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, our view must be broadened from a preoccupation with direct interactions between humans and machines to societal communication. This more widely targ…
Politicized and Paranoid? Assessing Attitudinal Predictors of Alternative News Consumption
The study of right-wing alternative news sources has moved to the center of scholarly attention recently. Such sources cater to news consumers characterized by extreme political views and mistrust toward mainstream news. However, research into the predictors of alternative news consumption is still scarce. We approach this gap by combining online tracking and survey data from 2,009 German panel participants. We find conspiratorial thinking and pr…
Transformative Tools, Emerging Challenges: Empirical and Practical Experiences With Large Language Models for Text Classification and Annotation in Communication Studies
Advancements in Large Language Models have been showing important research opportunities within the field of communication studies. It offers the capacity to conduct large-scale content classification and annotation with low computational expertise and reduced manual coding efforts, potentially allowing more possibilities for researchers in social sciences to explore understudied topics (Bail, 2023; Chang et al., 2024). Because of its functioning…
How affect shapes online information seeking about political actors
Search engines are both frequently used and widely trusted sources of current political information. While research has examined the different stages of information seeking via search, the question of how political preferences and sociodemographic factors impact political online search has received less attention. In particular, the way in which attitudinal factors, such as sentiment toward a politician or interest in their personal life motivate…
Humans and Machines in the Loop: Rethinking LLMS for Conflict and Disagreement in Content Analysis of Social Complex Phenomena
The study of polarization, conflict, and ideological divergence has long challenged scholars across media, communication, and political science. Understanding these phenomena requires engaging with fundamental questions about how opinions are formed, reinforced, and contested in public discourse, and how language and discourses can have so many different meanings and interpretations. Traditional content analysis methods often try to capture this …
Beyond the Black Box: A Multimodal Approach to Understanding In-App Communication
Mobile devices are increasingly central as sources of up-to-date information, making the precise recording of information behavior on these devices more relevant for research. Established methods of automated data collection are reaching their limits when capturing in-app communication, such as political content within social media applications. Based on two case studies, we present two approaches that enable the identification of exposure to rel…
From the Wild West to the Walled Garden: The Evolution of Twitter/X Data Access for Research
Introduction The proliferation of large online platforms has fundamentally reshaped societal processes, from political communication and civic interaction to the mundane organisation of everyday social life (Jungherr et al.). The large volumes of digital traces and interactions generated on these platforms offer researchers an unprecedented opportunity to study both contemporary society and how these digital environments shape it, enabling analys…
Computer Science (18 works) · Political science (16 works) · Social Media and Politics (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · World Wide Web (13 works) · Social media (12 works) · Psychology (10 works) · Politics (9 works) · Law (7 works) · Media Studies and Communication (7 works)