Postdoctoral Researcher: Media & Web Diets Observatory

Are you curious about how individuals use media and the internet more broadly in their daily lives and what content they read, watch, and interact with? Are you motivated to establish the foundations of a large-scale, longitudinal dataset to be used by a growing interdisciplinary network of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) researchers? Do you want to help answer crucial research questions about digital society? Are you interested in conducting both methodological and substantive work about (digital) media exposure? Then this postdoc position is right for you.

Integrating online news, including websites, social media, and digital newspapers in a way that allows researchers across the SSH field answer crucial research questions about the digital challenge is a major challenge. In this project, you will create a longitudinal dataset containing the media and web consumption patterns of individuals, linking content data with its consumers, and bridging between meso-level public debate (e.g., news coverage, social media posts, online discussions) and micro-level individual behavior and attitudes. You will work and advance a wide range of state-of-the-art methods, ranging from citizen science – working with individuals willing to donate their data for academic research – to the curation of collections of media content, and the linkage of micro-, meso- and macro-level data, creating FAIR, secure and sustainable datasets.

What are you going to do

You will:

• Design, implement and maintain the Media & Web Diets Observatory (MWDO) following FAIR principles and ensuring full compatibility with the existing collections of media within the Dutch national infrastructure
• Identify relevant platforms and sources for Media & Web Diets individual behavior (including media exposure data)
• Develop and deploy all relevant data donation scripts for these sources
• Coordinate the development and implementation of the questionnaires (self-reports) for the MWDO, extending the existing data within the LISS panel
• Work with stakeholders across the SSH field in the Netherlands to ensure that the data is useful and relevant for a broad range of research projects
• Initiate and support pilot studies using the MWDO, ensuring a broad range of SSH disciplines can run test cases and/or pilots within this infrastructure
• Conduct your own research, together with members of the broader SSH research community, on how web & media diets influence (and are influenced by) individual characteristic, attitudes and behavior.

Interviews will take place in April. In case of equal qualifications, internal candidates will be given preference over external candidates. In addition, those with a PhD in communication science will be preferred to allow for teaching possibilities within the Department.

For questions about the vacancy, you can contact: prof. dr. Theo Araujo (t.b.araujo@uva.nl)