Juliane Feustel holds a master’s degree in communication research and phonetics, psychology, and sociology. Since September 2022, she has been responsible for third-party funding administration, personnel management, and various organizational tasks at the DIID.
Previously, she worked as a project manager for various language service providers.
Anna-Maria Linstaedt has been working as a research assistant at DIID since April 2022. At HHU-Düsseldorf, she is studying for a Master’s degree in Political Communication. As an assistant in the core team, she supports the institute in various organizational tasks.
She is particularly interested in online deliberation research and its impact on political processes in democracies.
Hannah Harmsen has been working as a student assistant at DIID since January 2022. She studies Bachelor Social Sciences at the HHU-Düsseldorf. She supports the members of the DIID in research projects, especially in the statistical field, and takes over various internal tasks, such as the administration of the members and the website.
She is primarily interested in deviant political communication and the formation of filter bubbles on the net.
Jonathan Seim is a research associate at DIID, responsible for the coordination of the institute. He is also a research associate in the Digital Ethics project at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS). His position is financed by project funds from Stiftung Mercator. Previously, he studied political science and philosophy at HHU-Düsseldorf and at the University of the West of Scotland. His research focuses on moral philosophy and political philosophy, especially the theory of democracy. His dissertation in philosophy deals with democratic participation rights in citizen participation processes. Even though a correct distribution of participation rights is of fundamental importance for the legitimacy of the procedures, this question is neither sufficiently addressed in politics nor in science. The aim of the dissertation project is to develop criteria for the allocation of participation rights in consultative citizen participation procedures and practical recommendations for action.
In the context of DIID, his interest is focused on the legitimacy conditions of online participation.
Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders has been Professor of Communication and Media Studies at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2011. She is a member of the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online World”. In research and teaching, she is concerned with public discourse and public opinion formation and examines the role of established mass media and online communication in this process.
In the context of DIID, she is interested in the deliberative quality and trajectories of online discourses in the context of political participation processes.
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rosar has held the chair of Sociology II at the Institute of Social Sciences since 2010. Since 2015, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at HHU-Düsseldorf.
In research and teaching, he is primarily concerned with questions of political sociology, sociological inequality analysis and the methods of empirical social research.
Katharina Gerl has been a research assistant at DIID at HHU-Düsseldorf since 2016. She studied Political Science (B.A.) at the University of Bremen and Political Communication (M.A.) at HHU-Düsseldorf. For her dissertation at the Chair of Political Science II at Heinrich Heine University, she studied the impact of digital media on political parties as organizations.
Her research interests lie in the areas of effects and acceptance of digital democratic innovations in politics and administration as well as of artificial intelligence for political opinion-forming and decision-making.
Prof. Dr. Stefan Conrad has held the Chair of Databases and Information Systems at the Institute of Computer Science since 2002. He has been a member of the Senate of HHU-Düsseldorf since 2015. In his research, he works on issues related to the analysis of large data sets, especially in image retrieval, time series analysis, clustering, and text mining.
He has been cooperating with practice partners for many years, especially in several BMWi-funded ZIM projects on opinion mining, extraction of product features important for users, and automated text summarization.
At DIID, he is interested in researching techniques for automated topic detection and content analysis of text contributions as well as the identification of argument structures, subjective evaluations, and emotions.
Dr. Dennis Frieß is coordinator of the DIID. Since May 2019, he was coordinator of the NRW Research College Online Participation. From 2014 to 2019, he was a research assistant at the Chair of Communication and Media Studies III at HHU-Düsseldorf and a staff member at DIID. He studied Social Sciences, Law and Communication Science at the University of Erfurt (B.A.) and Political Communication in Düsseldorf (M.A.). His doctoral thesis focused on the analysis of deliberative online publics. His research focuses on political (online) communication, online deliberation, and online participation.
At the DIID, he is particularly interested in online-supported deliberation processes and the democracy-relevant expectations associated with online participation offerings.