Michael Achmann

As part of my doctoral thesis, I am looking at the current generations of social media. Younger platforms like Snapchat or Instagram offer with their Stories the possibility to share content for a limited time, messengers like Telegram are used to reach large groups of people while the shared content is not moderated by the platform. Thus, they pose new challenges to science and society: How can we analyze this ephemeral content, mostly images and video, and the hidden communications to capture current social discourses? The goal of my work is to combine existing research methods with adapted digital tools to perform analyses in an automated way and apply them to large data sets. Methods and tools should eventually be available for reuse without technical expertise.