AIUB hosts webinar on computational social science in journalism research
The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) at American International University-Bangladesh (AIUB) organised a webinar titled "Messy Data, Big Questions: Social Science in the Computational Age" on 5 March 2026.
The session featured Dr Christina Monzer, postdoctoral fellow at the Politics, Identities and Communication Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, as keynote speaker.
The webinar was attended by AIUB Pro-Vice-Chancellor Prof Dr Abdur Rahman, JMC adviser Prof Dr AJM Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan, and Prof Dr Pradip Kumar Panday, head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, along with faculty members and students. Assistant Professor Nasrin Akter hosted the programme.
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The session began with a welcome speech by Prof Panday, who emphasised the importance of integrating emerging research methods and interdisciplinary perspectives into journalism and communication education.
In his remarks, Prof Rahman said that in an era of unprecedented information flow, misinformation, disinformation and malinformation pose serious threats to the information ecosystem, and that mass communication professionals have an important role in addressing those challenges.
Prof Bhuiyan said introducing journalism and communication students to new ideas and approaches, including computational research, is essential for their academic and professional development.
In her presentation, Dr Monzer discussed the promises and challenges of computational social science (CSS). She explained how researchers can use large-scale digital data, often repurposed from online platforms, to explore major social questions.
However, she cautioned against what she described as the "seduction of scale", noting that large datasets can create false confidence because platform users do not necessarily represent the broader population and online behaviour is often shaped by platform algorithms.
She also highlighted key challenges in the field, including the replication crisis in computational research, ethical concerns over online privacy and data scraping, and limited access to platform data because of corporate control and regulatory restrictions.
Dr Monzer encouraged students and early-career researchers to develop interdisciplinary skills by learning programming languages such as Python or R, alongside data management, statistics, visualisation and causal inference methods.
The webinar ended with an interactive discussion session, where students and faculty members engaged with the speaker on the future of computational methods in journalism and communication research.
