Mario Haim
Biographic Data
| ID | 336727 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mario Haim |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mario |
| FAMILY NAME | Haim |
| SIGNATURE | HAIM M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0643-2299 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 82 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Unpacking Translation Effects. Influences of Target Language Choice on Topic Modeling in Multilingual Environments
Machine translation is widely used in communication science to consolidate texts, not least for exploratory clustering approaches such as multilingual topic modeling. However, the impact of target language choice on topic modeling results remains unclear. This study examines these effects by (a) consolidating texts into one of the original document languages and (b) translating texts into an intermediary language not present in the dataset under …
Let’s talk about language—and its role for replicability
Science strives towards a credible and comprehensive understanding of the world around us. Across disciplines within the social and behavioural sciences (and beyond), limitations in the implementation of the scientific approach have been identified in recent studies, showing low replicability of many results. This is an issue for knowledge accumulation, theory-building, and evidence-based decision and policy making. Researchers have proposed seve…
Contextual Changes, Credible Conclusions? A Direct and Conceptual Replication of Shen et al.'s (2019) Study on Online Image Credibility
Alarmingly low replication rates have been highlighted across disciplines. In communication science, rates are unknown but replications have some tradition. However, due to the field’s need to adapt to rapidly changing research contexts, replications have largely been conceptual rather than direct. We conduct two in-depth replications to systematically evaluate both forms. For that, we consider online information credibility as rapidly changing r…
Between Innovation and Standardization: Best Practices and Inclusive Guidelines in Computational Communication Science
Computational communication science is transitioning from an emerging to an established field within communication research, creating a need for proper guidelines and methodological standards. This forum gathers experienced computational communication science scholars to debate the merits and drawbacks of standardization and discuss the tension between innovation, rigor, and inclusion. The assembled perspectives review current standards for data …
Climate Communication in the Hybrid Media System: Media and Stakeholder Logics on Social Media
Climate change is a major political challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. Journalists—while following media logic—have a strong responsibility to inform the public of the scientific evidence on the causes and consequences of climate change and to explain the motivations driving the climate policies under discussion. However, within hybrid media systems, journalists increasingly compete for attention with climate stakeholders, who tend…
Fulfilling data access obligations: How could (and should) platforms facilitate data donation studies
Research into digital platforms has become increasingly difficult. One way to overcome these difficulties is to build on data access rights in EU data protection law, which requires platforms to offer users a copy of their data. In data donation studies, researchers ask study participants to exercise this right and donate their data to science. However, there is increasing evidence that platforms do not comply with designated laws. We first discu…
Are We Replicating Yet? Reproduction and Replication in Communication Research
The replication crisis has highlighted the importance of reproducibility and replicability in the social and behavioral sciences, including in communication research. While there have been some discussions of and studies on replications in communication research, the extent of this work is significantly lower than in psychology. The key reasons for this limitation are the differences between the disciplines in the topics commonly studied and in t…
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
Stereotypes and sexism? Effects of gender, topic, and user comments on journalists’ credibility
Gendered social roles raise assumptions about what female and male journalists ought to do. Prior studies have suggested that covering counter-stereotypical topics may decrease journalists’ source and their work’s message credibility. Pertaining also to prior studies on heuristic cues for credibility evaluation, user comments have been shown to serve as corrective, both positively and negatively affecting the perception of accompanying content. I…
Visual Gender Stereotyping in Campaign Communication: Evidence on Female and Male Candidate Imagery in 28 Countries
Using the case of the 2019 European election, the study compares the visual self-depiction of female and male political candidates from all European Union’s 28 member states on social networking sites and their depiction in the news coverage. It thereby investigates to what degree the news coverage and politicians’ self-depiction employs visual gender stereotypes. Moreover, the study presents results on differences in the depiction of male and fe…
Algorithms without frontiers? How language-based algorithmic information disparities for suicide crisis information sustain digital divides over time in 17 countries
This study focuses on the changes in the global digital divide produced by language-based, algorithmic information disparities in relation to crisis-prevention resources for suicide available through the Google search engine. We used agent-based testing to emulate Google searches performed in 17 countries and in 16 different languages as a direct replication and extension of previous work. We compare data collected in 2017 with data collected in …
User-centric approaches for collecting Facebook data in the ‘post-API age’: Experiences from two studies and recommendations for future research
Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via i…
Computational Communication Science: Eine Einführung
How open is communication science? Open-science principles in the field
Open-science principles, such as open data, shared materials, and pre-registration, are expected to encourage a culture of replication in scientific research. Yet, with its topical and methodological heterogeneity, communication science has been described to fall short of such principles. We analyze the extent to which open-science principles were used in publications from 20 leading communication journals between 2010 and 2020, and compare the r…
The paradox of knowing more and less: Audience metrics and the erosion of epistemic standards on the internet
Journalism is crucial to modern democracies in that it provides valid knowledge about current events in the form of news. Through shared epistemic standards and the professional norm of objectivity, journalism helps to generate societal knowledge and to make informed decisions. Yet, this surveillance function is also driven by knowledge about audiences. Knowledge about audiences informs both journalism’s and mutual recipients’ expectations toward…
The German Data Journalist in 2021
Data journalists have become established in online newsrooms. Previously considered tech-savvy journalistic outsiders, they have repeatedly been described as their own closed community which has only recently gained severe attention and importance due to heavy data-driven reporting (e.g., COVID-19, investigative journalism, climate crisis). This is particularly true for data journalists in Germany who have repeatedly received worldwide attention …
You Should Read This Study! It Investigates Scandinavian Social Media Logics ☝
In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all S…
Gütekriterien und Handlungsempfehlungen für die Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft
Die Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware ist für die empirische Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft (KMW) aufgrund sozialer, gesetzlicher, normativer und technologischer Veränderungen unabdingbar. Forschungssoftware umfasst dabei Skripte und Programme, die für den Zweck der Forschung und innerhalb des Fachs entwickelt werden, deren Entwicklung in der KMW jedoch, im Gegensatz zu einigen anderen Disziplinen, häufig innerhalb einzelner Forschungspr…
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
Politicians’ Self-depiction and Their News Portrayal: Evidence from 28 Countries Using Visual Computational Analysis
Visual content plays a crucial role in today's online political communication, especially during election campaigns. Prior research on candidate imagery has shown particular effects from non-verbal behavior (e.g., smiling), contextual features (e.g., the depiction of other people), and structural characteristics (e.g., camera angle and proximity). Importantly, this study argues to look at candidate imagery as institutionalized means of political …
Do News Actually 'Find Me'? Using Digital Behavioral Data to Study the News-Finds-Me Phenomenon
Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the belief that 'news finds me' (NFM). Notably, the three dimensions of NFM-feeling informed, relying on…
Algorithmic Actants in Practice, Theory, and Method
What changes as algorithms proliferate within journalism and become more sophisticated? In this essay, we synthesize the articles in this thematic issue, which offer empirical evidence for how algorithms—and especially those designed to automate news production—are being incorporated not only into journalistic activities but also into the logics of journalism itself. They underscore that journalists have neither feared nor rejected such algorithm…
Agent-based Testing: An Automated Approach toward Artificial Reactions to Human Behavior
Vast amounts of news are consumed through algorithmically curated media environments, such as search engines, social networking sites, or news aggregators. This renders algorithmic content curation with much societal relevance and highlights the urgent need for independent and resilient academic research. Therefore, a plethora of methodological approaches have been applied, such as case studies, expert interviews, observations, or agent-based app…
Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides using agent-based testing: A cross-national study in four European countries
Die Orientierung von Online-Journalismus an seinen Publika: Anforderung, Antizipation, Anspruch
Readers’ perception of computer-generated news: Credibility, expertise, and readability
We conducted an online experiment to study people’s perception of automated computer-written news. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 design, we varied the article topic (sports, finance; within-subjects) and both the articles’ actual and declared source (human-written, computer-written; between-subjects). Nine hundred eighty-six subjects rated two articles on credibility, readability, and journalistic expertise. Varying the declared source had small but consiste…
Politicians’ Self-depiction and Their News Portrayal: Evidence from 28 Countries Using Visual Computational Analysis
Visual content plays a crucial role in today's online political communication, especially during election campaigns. Prior research on candidate imagery has shown particular effects from non-verbal behavior (e.g., smiling), contextual features (e.g., the depiction of other people), and structural characteristics (e.g., camera angle and proximity). Importantly, this study argues to look at candidate imagery as institutionalized means of political …
Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign
Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue own…
Diffusion as a future perspective of agenda setting
The changing media environment has led to fragmentation of both media and audiences and thus to new flows of news items across channels and time. It has become challenging to clearly distinguish public and media agendas and their relationships. Our traditional way of counting single news items to determine an issue’s importance does not apply online. Articles are not scheduled into fixed publication cycles, they are moved, updated, or shared. Mor…
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides using agent-based testing: A cross-national study in four European countries
The German Data Journalist in 2021
Data journalists have become established in online newsrooms. Previously considered tech-savvy journalistic outsiders, they have repeatedly been described as their own closed community which has only recently gained severe attention and importance due to heavy data-driven reporting (e.g., COVID-19, investigative journalism, climate crisis). This is particularly true for data journalists in Germany who have repeatedly received worldwide attention …
Equal access to online information? Google’s suicide-prevention disparities may amplify a global digital divide
Worldwide, people profit from equally accessible online health information via search engines. Therefore, equal access to health information is a global imperative. We studied one specific scenario, in which Google functions as a gatekeeper when people seek suicide-related information using both helpful and harmful suicide-related search terms. To help prevent suicides, Google implemented a “suicide-prevention result” (SPR) at the very top of suc…
Agent-based Testing: An Automated Approach toward Artificial Reactions to Human Behavior
Vast amounts of news are consumed through algorithmically curated media environments, such as search engines, social networking sites, or news aggregators. This renders algorithmic content curation with much societal relevance and highlights the urgent need for independent and resilient academic research. Therefore, a plethora of methodological approaches have been applied, such as case studies, expert interviews, observations, or agent-based app…
Do News Actually 'Find Me'? Using Digital Behavioral Data to Study the News-Finds-Me Phenomenon
Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the belief that 'news finds me' (NFM). Notably, the three dimensions of NFM-feeling informed, relying on…
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Readers’ perception of computer-generated news: Credibility, expertise, and readability
We conducted an online experiment to study people’s perception of automated computer-written news. Using a 2 × 2 × 2 design, we varied the article topic (sports, finance; within-subjects) and both the articles’ actual and declared source (human-written, computer-written; between-subjects). Nine hundred eighty-six subjects rated two articles on credibility, readability, and journalistic expertise. Varying the declared source had small but consiste…
Burst of the Filter Bubble?: Effects of personalization on the diversity of Google News
In offering personalized content geared toward users’ individual interests, recommender systems are assumed to reduce news diversity and thus lead to partial information blindness (i.e., filter bubbles). We conducted two exploratory studies to test the effect of both implicit and explicit personalization on the content and source diversity of Google News. Except for small effects of implicit personalization on content diversity, we found no suppo…
Popularity cues in online media: A review of conceptualizations, operationalizations, and general effects
Internet users are constantly confronted with metric information about the popularity of goods, services, and content.These popularity cues (PCs)-which we define as metric information about users' behavior or their evaluations of entities-serve as social signals for users who are confronted with them.Due to the high relevance that PCs have for organizations, consumers, and scholars, this article provides a systematic overview of PC research.First…
Equal access to online information? Google’s suicide-prevention disparities may amplify a global digital divide
Worldwide, people profit from equally accessible online health information via search engines. Therefore, equal access to health information is a global imperative. We studied one specific scenario, in which Google functions as a gatekeeper when people seek suicide-related information using both helpful and harmful suicide-related search terms. To help prevent suicides, Google implemented a “suicide-prevention result” (SPR) at the very top of suc…
Die Orientierung von Online-Journalismus an seinen Publika: Anforderung, Antizipation, Anspruch
Open-Source Trading Zones and Boundary Objects: Examining GitHub as a Space for Collaborating on “News”
New actors, actants, and activities have entered journalism’s spaces in recent years. While this has raised the potential for the disruption of existing social orders, such heterogeneous assemblages also provide fruitful grounds for substantive innovation within “trading zones.” This article explores one such potential zone, the code-sharing platform GitHub, delineating the primary actors oriented around the boundary object of “news,” the objecti…
Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign
Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue own…
Diffusion as a future perspective of agenda setting
The changing media environment has led to fragmentation of both media and audiences and thus to new flows of news items across channels and time. It has become challenging to clearly distinguish public and media agendas and their relationships. Our traditional way of counting single news items to determine an issue’s importance does not apply online. Articles are not scheduled into fixed publication cycles, they are moved, updated, or shared. Mor…
Algorithmic Actants in Practice, Theory, and Method
What changes as algorithms proliferate within journalism and become more sophisticated? In this essay, we synthesize the articles in this thematic issue, which offer empirical evidence for how algorithms—and especially those designed to automate news production—are being incorporated not only into journalistic activities but also into the logics of journalism itself. They underscore that journalists have neither feared nor rejected such algorithm…
Agent-based Testing: An Automated Approach toward Artificial Reactions to Human Behavior
Vast amounts of news are consumed through algorithmically curated media environments, such as search engines, social networking sites, or news aggregators. This renders algorithmic content curation with much societal relevance and highlights the urgent need for independent and resilient academic research. Therefore, a plethora of methodological approaches have been applied, such as case studies, expert interviews, observations, or agent-based app…
Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides using agent-based testing: A cross-national study in four European countries
You Should Read This Study! It Investigates Scandinavian Social Media Logics ☝
In order to reach its audiences, journalism regularly turns to social media to promote its articles. This study sets out to ascertain competing communicative logics of Facebook posts as opposed to article teasers on news outlets’ websites. We look at Scandinavian news outlets as a most-similar three-country case with at least a third of all news consumers regularly using Facebook for news. The study builds on an extensive data collection of all S…
Gütekriterien und Handlungsempfehlungen für die Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware in der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft
Die Entwicklung von Forschungssoftware ist für die empirische Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft (KMW) aufgrund sozialer, gesetzlicher, normativer und technologischer Veränderungen unabdingbar. Forschungssoftware umfasst dabei Skripte und Programme, die für den Zweck der Forschung und innerhalb des Fachs entwickelt werden, deren Entwicklung in der KMW jedoch, im Gegensatz zu einigen anderen Disziplinen, häufig innerhalb einzelner Forschungspr…
Toward ‘Cultures of Engagement’? An exploratory comparison of engagement patterns on Facebook news posts
Information production, dissemination, and consumption are contingent upon cultural and financial dimensions. This study attempts to find cultures of engagement that reflect how audiences engage with news posts made by either commercial or state-owned news outlets on Facebook. To do so, we collected over a million news posts ( n = 1,173,159) produced by 482 news outlets in three Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Norway, and Sweden) and analyzed ov…
Politicians’ Self-depiction and Their News Portrayal: Evidence from 28 Countries Using Visual Computational Analysis
Visual content plays a crucial role in today's online political communication, especially during election campaigns. Prior research on candidate imagery has shown particular effects from non-verbal behavior (e.g., smiling), contextual features (e.g., the depiction of other people), and structural characteristics (e.g., camera angle and proximity). Importantly, this study argues to look at candidate imagery as institutionalized means of political …
Do News Actually 'Find Me'? Using Digital Behavioral Data to Study the News-Finds-Me Phenomenon
Research on news exposure has shown that while political knowledge and interest largely determine the degree of active engagement with online news, some people are generally less willing to invest into actively staying informed. Instead, these people report to pursue a passive mode of relying on specific sources, such as social media, based on the belief that 'news finds me' (NFM). Notably, the three dimensions of NFM-feeling informed, relying on…
The paradox of knowing more and less: Audience metrics and the erosion of epistemic standards on the internet
Journalism is crucial to modern democracies in that it provides valid knowledge about current events in the form of news. Through shared epistemic standards and the professional norm of objectivity, journalism helps to generate societal knowledge and to make informed decisions. Yet, this surveillance function is also driven by knowledge about audiences. Knowledge about audiences informs both journalism’s and mutual recipients’ expectations toward…
The German Data Journalist in 2021
Data journalists have become established in online newsrooms. Previously considered tech-savvy journalistic outsiders, they have repeatedly been described as their own closed community which has only recently gained severe attention and importance due to heavy data-driven reporting (e.g., COVID-19, investigative journalism, climate crisis). This is particularly true for data journalists in Germany who have repeatedly received worldwide attention …
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
Stereotypes and sexism? Effects of gender, topic, and user comments on journalists’ credibility
Gendered social roles raise assumptions about what female and male journalists ought to do. Prior studies have suggested that covering counter-stereotypical topics may decrease journalists’ source and their work’s message credibility. Pertaining also to prior studies on heuristic cues for credibility evaluation, user comments have been shown to serve as corrective, both positively and negatively affecting the perception of accompanying content. I…
Visual Gender Stereotyping in Campaign Communication: Evidence on Female and Male Candidate Imagery in 28 Countries
Using the case of the 2019 European election, the study compares the visual self-depiction of female and male political candidates from all European Union’s 28 member states on social networking sites and their depiction in the news coverage. It thereby investigates to what degree the news coverage and politicians’ self-depiction employs visual gender stereotypes. Moreover, the study presents results on differences in the depiction of male and fe…
Algorithms without frontiers? How language-based algorithmic information disparities for suicide crisis information sustain digital divides over time in 17 countries
This study focuses on the changes in the global digital divide produced by language-based, algorithmic information disparities in relation to crisis-prevention resources for suicide available through the Google search engine. We used agent-based testing to emulate Google searches performed in 17 countries and in 16 different languages as a direct replication and extension of previous work. We compare data collected in 2017 with data collected in …
User-centric approaches for collecting Facebook data in the ‘post-API age’: Experiences from two studies and recommendations for future research
Although other social media platforms have seen a steeper increase in users recently, Facebook is still the social networking site with the largest number of users worldwide. A large number of studies from the social and behavioral sciences have investigated the antecedents, types, and consequences of its use. In addition or as an alternative to self-reports from users, many studies have used data from the platform itself, usually collected via i…
Computational Communication Science: Eine Einführung
Computer Science (24 works) · Political science (22 works) · Social Media and Politics (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · World Wide Web (11 works) · Data science (8 works)