Juliane Feustel holds a master’s degree in communication research and phonetics, psychology, and sociology and has been working as a clerk at DIID since September 2022, where she is responsible for third-party funding administration, personnel management, and various organizational tasks.
Previously, she worked as a project manager for various language service providers.
Anna-Maria Linstaedt works as a graduate assistant at DIID since April of 2022.
She is currently studying Political Communication for her master’s degree at the Heinrich-Heine-University. At DIID she is responsible for various organizational tasks.
Her particular interest lies in online deliberation research and the respective consequences for political processes in democracies.
Mathis Zens is employed at the DIID team as a student assistant since the beginnig of 2022.
He ist studying PPE/Philosophy, Politics & Economics at Düsseldorf University whereas his main focus is in the statistical field.
He is responsible for internal and organizational tasks.
He is interested in the optimazation of political processes due to online-deliberation and the influence of artificial intelligence on decisions.
Hannah Harmsen works as a student assistant at the DIID since January 2022. She is studying the Bachelor of Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University.
She supports the members of the DIID in research projects, especially in the statistical field, and takes on various internal tasks.
Her main interest is deviant political communication and the formation of filter bubbles on the internet.
Jonathan Seim studied political science and philosophy at Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf and at the University of the West of Scotland. As a research assistant at DIID, he is responsible for the coordination of the institute. He is also a research assistant in the Digital Ethics project at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS). Jonathan Seim’s position is financed by project funds from the Mercator Foundation. His research focuses on moral philosophy and political philosophy, in particular democratic theory.
His dissertation deals with democratic participation rights in the context of citizen participation procedures. Although a correct allocation of participation rights is of fundamental importance for the legitimacy of those procedures, this question is not sufficiently addressed in politics or science. The aim of the dissertation project is to develop criteria for the allocation of participation rights in the context of consultative citizen participation procedures and guidance for the political practice. As a member of the DIID he is interested in requierements of legitimacy of online-participation.
Prof. Dr. Christiane Eilders has been a professor for communication and media studies at the Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf since 2011. She is a member of the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online-World”.
Her research deals with public discourses and public opinion formation and puts a focus on the role of established mass media and online-communication.
Within the DIID, her interest lies in the deliberative quality and the different types of processes in online-discourses in the realm of political participation.
Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rosar has held one of three chairs of sociology within the Department of Social Sciences since 2010. Since 2015, he has been Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf.
In teaching and research he mainly focuses on questions of political sociology, the sociological analysis of inequality, and the methodology of empirical social sciences.
Katharina Gerl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID). In her PhD thesis she analyzed the effects of digitalization and mediatization on party organizations in Germany.
Her research focuses on the implications of digital technologies for political institutions, political communication and participation. She conducted several studies evaluating the usage of onlinebased tools by political organizations. At the DIID she is also in charge of the unit that focusses on the evaluation of online public participation and the development of evaluation criteria to measure and compare the input, output, outcome and impact of digital tools for public participation.
Stefan Conrad is full professor in computer science at Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf since 2002. He has a chair for databases and information systems. Since 2015 he is member of the Academic Senate of the Heinrich Heine University.
His research considers the analysis of large data sets, in particular, he is interested in image retrieval, the analysis of large time series, clustering, and text mining. He has on-going cooperations with industrial partners. Several of these cooperations were funded by the BMWi (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) in a research and development programme for small and medium enterprises. These projects dealt with opinion mining (sentiment analysis), extraction of product features relevant for users, and automated text summarization. At DIID his research interest is currently focused on automated topic extraction and content analyses of texts as well as identifying argument structures, sentiments, and emotions.
Dr. Dennis Frieß is the research coordinator of the Düsseldorf Institute of Internet and Democracy. He holds a Bachelor degree in Political Sciences, Social Sciences and Communications from the University of Erfurt and a Master in Political Communication from the University of Düsseldorf. He graduated in 2014 with a master’s thesis on the “Empirical analysis of online deliberation processes”. From 2014 until 2019 he worked as a research fellow at the media and communication department. In 2020 he finished his PhD on Deliberative Online Publics.
His research interests are political (online) communication, online deliberation and e-participation. As a member of the DIID he is interested online deliberation and democracy-related expectations that are associated with e-participation.