In this talk, Professor Herkman will discuss why changes in media environment during the last 10 years coerce the research focus from pure media studies to more societally and/or politically emphasized research. By the same token, legacy media still serve important data for empirical analyses and social media (big) data may push towards invalid or irrelevant results depending on research problems and methodologies in question. As a more precise example of the discussion above Professor Herkman will introduce two fresh studies carried out in a large-scale research project Mainstreaming Populism in the 21st century (2017-2021, funded by the Academy of Finland). The first study is an analysis of the use of populism terminology in legacy newspapers of six countries in 2000-2018 which was conducted together with Niko Hatakka, the second is a comparative analysis of political Twitter communication during the 2019 European Parliamentary election campaigns in eight European countries (including Germany), carried out with a research group of 16 scholars in different countries and directed together with Emilia Palonen. Both studies are still work in progress or under publishing process.

The talk will be held online via Webex. It is organized by the “Digitalisation and the Transnational Public Sphere” research group at the Weizenbaum Institute.

When: Wednesday, December 8th, 2021, 4.00pm

Where: online via the following link talk with Prof. Juha Herkman