Christian Baden

Christian Baden
Christian
Baden
Associate Professor‎

I am an associate professor at the Department of Communication and Journalism and the Smart Institute at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, affiliated also with the Hebrew University's Center for Interdisciplinary Data Science Research (CIDR). My research focuses on the collaborative construction of meaning in dynamic, political public debates. Specifically, I study processes of contestation and the renegotiation of shared meanings, as well as those cultural and discursive resonance processes that render specific ideas intuitively plausible and account for their enduring, sometimes resilient presence in public discourse and contribute to political polarization and hostility. My publications have contributed to theory and methodology in research on framing, discourse dynamics, and the social and psychological process of sense making, consensus and contestation in a political public sphere. My methodological work combines techniques of qualitative discourse analysis and frame analysis with network-analytic perspectives and contemporary strategies for the automated processing of large-scale discourse. I operate the JAmCAT platform for automated text analysis, and I am a member of the European research infrastructure project OPTED "Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies", as well as the PROFECI project team on “Mediating the Future: The Social Dynamics of Public Projections”. I am also a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of CommunicationCommunication Methods & Measures, Digital Journalism and Computational Communication Research.

 

Research Interests

  • Dynamics in public discourse

  • Resonance

  • Contestation, Protest & Political conflict

  • Viewpoint Diversity

  • Alternative Facts & Conspiracy Theories

  • Computational/multi-methodological text analysis

  • Multilingual text analysis

 

Selected Publications

 

Awards and Prizes

  • ICA Top Reviewer (2020; and Top Reviewer for ICA Political Communication Division 2020, 2019, 2018; for ICA Journalism Studies Division 2018)

  • ICA Top Poster Award 2019, 2017

  • Honorable Mention for the Communication Methods & Measures “Article of the Year” 2014