In times of increasingly complex social realities, driven at least in parts by digitalization and datafication, coupled with an increasing usability of computational tools, the study of communication benefits from the adoption of computational research approaches. Involved with the development and the application of a broad range of advanced computational methods to study communication phenomena, the Department of Communication pushes the methodological boundaries of the field in various ways. Computational communication research strongly interacts with related disciplines such as political science, informatics, computer linguistics or psychology.

While existing expertise in this area is very broad, the Department of Communication particularly focuses on a number of subdomains.

• Automated text analysis
  Public communication in current societies to a large degree takes place through texts of various kinds, ranging from traditional newspaper articles to tweets or user comments. To make sense of vast amounts of texts, computational communication research develops and makes use of algorithmic tools, both supervised and unsupervised, for text classification. Researchers also focus on critical assessments of current approaches, on the development of multilingual techniques and on computer vision for the analysis of images.

• Network analysis and simulation
  Studies of the interlinkages between and interactions of citizens or public actors and how they influence each other draw on advanced models of network analysis that go beyond describing networks and primarily focus on explaining such networks and their particularities. Addressing complexities of social interactions beyond what is commonly empirically observable, researchers make use of simulation studies.

• Experimentation
  Advances in experimental communication effects research are prominently applied in various research domains. These include increasingly complex experimental administrations in online environments, but more so also the application of physio-psychological measures such as heart rate, skin conductance or brain activities as well as eye-tracking techniques.