Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research (ZEDOE)

We warmly welcome Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat as a fellow at the Institute of Communication!

Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat is a researcher at the Sheffield Hallam University, UK. His research focuses on the factors that shape communicative spaces: the integration of social interactions with mobile and digital social platforms, with the physical-geographic space. This field opens into a triple research discussion that combines 1) media governance and power, 2) cultural production, communities and identities, and 3) the geopolitics of platforms and communication infrastructures and technologies. Ramon Rodriguez-Amaz uses digital and computational methods to analyse communicative activity in space and place.

He has been invited and participated in research and teaching exchanges in more than ten different universities around Europe including Austria, Germany, France, Spain and Catalunya; and of course, the United Kingdom. As a social scientist, he fights monsters of social injustice, social discrimination and social inequalities reproduced by technologies and by wrong decisions. As a teacher, he finds personal pleasure in learning, in changing the ways of thinking. He says: „Perhaps this explains why I study technology, and why science is for me also a way of creativity more than a Techne, or why I am so terribly scared of monkeys with weapons.“

Dr. Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat will be in the department this week and soon visit for a second time. In the following days, we are looking forward to talking about future research and teaching cooperations.

Project: ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence

The chatbot ChatGPT is able to generate texts that closely resemble human communication. A series of studies on the use of generative AI is being conducted at the center to investigate the diffusion of such applications of generative AI in different fields of application. Insight into the first research results is provided by an interactive graphic, which can be used to explore the diffusion since the start of ChatGPT in November 2022.

About the center

The Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research focuses on the theoretical and empirical analysis of the preconditions, characteristics and characteristics of digitizes public spheres. Analyses are conducted from a social science perspective, in particular a communication science perspective on the mico, meso and macro level. Research also addresses specific (partial) public spheres and their processes of interchange with various societal subsystems (such as politics, economy, science). Innovative theoretical approaches and research methods for digitized communication and accompanying processes or societal changes are developed in this process.
The center’s aims are to bring together the researchers that are engaged in research concerning digitized public spheres at the University of Münster (WWU), to encourage the exchange and the discussion with external researchers and to make the research results fruitful academic teaching.
The aims also include promoting the engagement in public discourses and to strengthen WWU’s profile in this research area, especially in the department of Communication Science.

The operations of the Center for Digitized Public Spheres Research include the following:

• Initiation, planning and coordination of third party projects for (interdisciplinary) research concerning digitized public spheres;
• Organization of symposia, speech and lecture series with the involvement of external researchers;
• Execution of colloquia and courses for professors, scientific staff, PhD students and students and students in order to promote junior researchers;
• Active transfer of knowledge to the general public and to expert and thematic audiences, contact maintenance and -mediation and consulting and mutual exchange of information with national and international organizations.