Tom Willaert
Postdoctoral Researcher
Tom Willaert is a Postdoctoral researcher in digital methods in the Centre for Digitalisation, Democracy and Innovation (CD2I) of the Brussels School of Governance. Building on a background in humanities scholarship, he develops and uses computational methods for text analysis in order to study societal, cultural and political conflicts in online media. On 1 October 2021, Tom joined VUB’s Brussels School of Governance and Department of Media Studies as a postdoctoral researcher and coordinator of EDMO BELUX, a hub for research on digital media and disinformation. This hub, funded by the European Commission, will gather a network of experts with the aim of responding to harmful disinformation campaigns. For an overview of Tom’s projects and publications, see this web page.
Research areas
Featured publications
POINcaré series: A Question of Truth / Een vraag naar waarheid [in Dutch]
Deep State Phobia. Narrative Convergence in Coronavirus Conspiracism on Instagram
Disinformation Networks. A Quali-Quantitative Investigation of Antagonistic Dutch-speaking Telegram Channels
Detecting Traces of Narrative Evolution on Telegram. Inductive Methods from Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis
Telegram and digital methods: Mapping networked conspiracy theories through platform affordances
The rise of “gaslighting”: Debates about disinformation on Twitter and 4chan, and the possibility of a ‘good echo chamber’
Tracking Causal Relations in the News: Data, Tools, and Models for the Analysis of Argumentative Statements in Online Media
Projects
SoMe4Dem-Social Media for Democracy – understanding the causal mechanisms of digital citizenship
Funded by EU
EDMO BELUX - European Digital Media Observatory for Belgium and Luxembourg
Co-funded by the EU
Events
Waarheid en wetenschap. Een boekvoorstelling met aansluitende lezing van Robbert Dijkgraaf
(Workshop) Reading texts with machines: an introduction to corpus analysis and natural language processing in the social sciences and humanities
News
