I’m very happy to announce that since today, all four articles that came out of my dissertation project are either published or accepted for publication. This means that I can finally close this research project. I enjoyed very much investigating how people use different news outlets in today’s media environment, but now it’s time for new challenging projects (which, in fact, I have already started with quite some time ago).
A PhD project is not finished on the day your PhD contract ends: Publication takes time, and the old project keeps chasing you: You have to wait, wait, revise the manuscript, wait, wait … You get the picture. So, while the project basically ended with me handing in my dissertation on 5 December 2012 (or maybe with my public defense on 4 June 2013), it still was not really finished. Now it is.

This is what came out of it:

Trilling D., & Schoenbach, K. (accepted for publication). Challenging selective exposure: Do online news users choose sites that match their interests and preferences? Digital Journalism.

Trilling, D., & Schoenbach, K. (accepted for publication). Investigating people’s news diets: How online news users use offline news. Communications: The European Journal of Communication Research.

Trilling, D., & Schoenbach, K. (2013). Patterns of news consumption in Austria: How fragmented are they? International Journal of Communication, 7, 929-953.

Trilling, D., & Schoenbach, K. (2013). Skipping current affairs: The non-users of online and offline news. European Journal of Communication, 28(1). 35-51. doi:10.1177/0267323112453671

Yesterday, I had the honor to give an invited talk at Coding Culture in Utrecht. Coding Culture is an initiative by graduate students from Utrecht University with a background in New Media and Digital Culture. They set up a group consisting of 15 graduate students who are eager to advance their skills by teaching themselves how to write computer programs. As people who know me will confirm, I really think this a skill that all social science students [and from related disciplines in the humanities, for that matter] should have, because it greatly advances our possibilities to understand the world – so I basically just had to accept the invitation to speak at their kickoff meeting. And it was great fun! I gave an introductory talk with some examples (slides here), and after that, we were playing around with the code.

Very interesting & inspiring introduction to Python by @damian0604 at #codingculture @SETUPUtrecht @stephaniedsmale pic.twitter.com/050MY4JxXV

— Jolien (@jolienlisa) 5 maart 2014

Also I learned a bunch of things: About typical problems people unfamiliar with programs have, about the differences between academic disciplines, and about the pitfalls of certain not-to-be-named operating systems. Oh, and the English word for proefkonijn (guinea pig).

I promised the people from Utrecht to drop by again in some time to see what they made out of it. So keep up the good work, I’m looking forward to it!