Wouter van Atteveldt - Computational Communication Science & Political Communication

I am an interdisciplinary scientist by training, having received my M.Sc. in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh and a joint Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence and Communication Science from the VU Amsterdam. I am Professor of Computational Communication Science & Political Communication at the VU.

My main research agenda is developing and applying the computational methods and tools needed to study media effects in a fragmented digital media landscape. As people consume news from an increasing number of traditional and social media sources, the field urgently needs better ways to measure news consumption in order to study the effects of each person’s individual media diet. My research contributes directly to this through our pioneering work on data donation, where (fully informed and consenting) respondents donate a cleaned and minimized version of their social, mobile and digital news browsing history. In the Horizon Europe project WHAT-IF, we combine such data donations with agent-based models and generative AI to simulate the (social) media landscape, allowing us to test how changes in the information environment affect the functioning of democracy.

A second key part of my research agenda is the introduction, adaptation and validation of methods from AI and computational linguistics in communication science. Large Language Models and related techniques offer enormous opportunities for text analysis, but using them for valid measurement requires careful validation and attention to bias.

My research has been funded by a range of national and international grants, including an NWO VENI grant on mediatized agenda setting, NWO grants on news recommender algorithms and filter bubbles, the NWO digital data donation infrastructure (D3I), and the Horizon Europe project WHAT-IF, which I lead as PI. I co-founded and chaired the Computational Methods division of ICA, and I founded the open access journal Computational Communication Research, published by Amsterdam University Press, which I led as editor-in-chief from 2019 to 2026. In recognition of these contributions, I was inducted as a Fellow of the International Communication Association in 2026.