About the organisation
TWON is coordinated by a team of leading researchers at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). ASCoR is one of the world’s leading communication science departments and consistently ranked as one of the top departments in its field. The institute is dedicated to understanding the challenges of digitalization, personalization, and fragmentation. Its research focuses on the impact of these developments on individuals, including misinformation, manipulation, human-machine communication, and algorithmic selection.
The UvA coordinates the TWON project as a whole. Next to that, the Amsterdam Team has two main tasks: First, we develop theoretically funded metrics to assess debate quality. Second, we will – together with the other partners – conduct the case studies to inform the further development of a TWON prototype and to ground it with human participants’ data.
The team
Damian Trilling, Associate Professor for Communication in the Digital Society
Damian Trilling is an Associate Professor in the Programme Group of Political Communication and Journalism at the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam. He has a background in communication science and has a strong affinity with computational methods, which he uses to study where people encounter news and societally relevant information and how these are spread. Damian’s main role is being the coordinator of the consortium as a whole as well as leading the local Amsterdam team. In this role, he hopes – together with Alisa – to put all pieces together to build a TWON.
Corinna Oschatz, Assistant Professor for Political Communication and Journalism
Corinna Oschatz is an Assistant Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), University of Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in communication science from the University of Mainz (2016). Her current research focuses on the use and effects of negative campaigning, political journalism, and narrative persuasion. Within TWON, she will contribute to the network development with expertise on dynamics and power structures in the public sphere and join Damian in the role as Postdoc supervisor.
Michael Heseltine, Postdoctoral Researcher
Michael Heseltine is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Programme Group of Political Communication and Journalism at the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam. A political scientist by training, his background is in the study of elite rhetoric and political discourse on social media. Prior to joining TWON, he also worked as a postdoc at the University of Amsterdam looking at news exposure in a multi-country context. With TWON he will focus on the design and implementation of experimental case studies, as well as devising strategies for analysis of social media trace data.
Sjoerd Stolwijk, Postdoctoral Researcher
Sjoerd Stolwijk is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Programme Group of Political Communication and Journalism at the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam. He has previously studied the effects of opinion polls on electoral behavior and journalistic framing, as well as the influence of cognitive biases on political decision making. He then worked as a methodologist at the Dutch Public Broadcaster (NPO) dealing with computational issues in media measurement, but has now returned to academic life to find the best way to measure online debate quality for TWON.
Alisa Kerschbaum, Project Manager to TWON