Yijing Chen, a PhD candidate at the Department of Network and Data Science, at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna, has joined our fellowship program. Her research centers around online political communication, social media, and social networks. With her background in Information Science, she is currently investigating the role of social media in political polarization, applying network analytics and natural language processing to measure polarization and understand structural patterns. Yijing is a curious reader in the broad field of computational social science and is interested in bridging perspectives and fostering collaborations across disciplines.
Her ongoing PhD project collects and analyzes self-donated digital traces from multiple social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, Instagram), combined with self-reported questionnaire responses from a nationally representative sample in Hungary. By considering both attitudes and behaviors, she assesses and compares the degree of polarization reflected in people’s self-perceived ideological positions and digital traits online.
See more details about Yijing’s research project she will develop at MJRC on her fellowship page.