Dennis Nguyen

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Utrecht University

Digital and computational methods promise to fundamentally change research practices in media and communications studies. However, due to economic and other practical reasons, access to digital data is often restricted. For example, acquiring the necessary skills in developing and applying tools for data collection and analysis is a time-consuming...

In the COVID-19 pandemic, societal discourses and social interaction are subject to rapid mediatisation and digitalisation, which accelerate datafication. This indicates urgency for increasing data literacy: individual abilities in understanding and critically assessing datafication and its social implications. Immediate challenges concern misconce...

This study explores the news framing of A.I., China, and the U.S.A. in two mainstream news outlets: The Washington Post and The South China Morning Post. The main objective is to analyse how both, as parts of different discourse cultures, portray the competition for leadership in A.I. innovation between China and the U.S.A. The study takes a critic...

Analysing how news media portray A.I. reveals what interpretative frameworks around the technology circulate in public discourses. This allows for critical reflections on the making of meaning in prevalent narratives about A.I. and its impact. While research on the public perception of datafication and automation is growing, only a few studies inve...

This conceptual paper explores the role of communication around data practices of Big Tech companies. By critiquing communication practices, we argue that Big Tech platforms shape users into data subjects through framing, influencing behaviour, and the black-boxing of algorithms. We approach communication about data from three perspectives: (1) cur...

Netflix is often credited with mainstreaming binge-watching through its release strategy and interface features. However, despite this reputation, data on actual consumption patterns remains scarce, enabling Netflix to shape the narrative about how content is consumed on its platform and what this implies about content quality and viewer attentiven...

This study analyzes how ChatGPT portrays and describes itself, revealing misleading myths about AI technologies, specifically conversational agents based on large language models. This analysis allows for critical reflection on the potential harm these misconceptions may pose for public understanding of AI and related technologies. While previous r...

Media framing of organizational crises is an important factor to consider in crisis communication since it can shape stakeholders' perceptions of organizations and discussions in the public sphere. This takes place in complex media ecologies where public communication happens at a large scale, both in the news and on social media. Here, computation...

This study explores how African news media frame China’s role in digital technology. China’s engagement in Africa is portrayed as an ambiguous trend by Western media, which point to risks of Chinese influence. Themes of exploitation and support for autocratic regimes are common in media narratives about Chinese-African collaborations. Yet claims th...

Public discourses have become sensitive to the ethical challenges of big data and artificial intelligence, as scandals about privacy invasion, algorithmic discrimination, and manipulation in digital platforms repeatedly make news headlines. However, it remains largely unexplored how exactly these complex issues are presented to lay audiences and to...

Digital media serve manifold purposes connected to communication, transition, resource allocation, and integration in the context of forced migration. Many apps and platforms rely on user data. Organizations do not always clearly communicate what data are collected for which purposes. Policies on data and privacy should convey this information, but...

The user experience of our daily interactions is increasingly shaped with the aid of AI, mostly as the output of recommendation engines. However, it is less common to present users with possibilities to navigate or adapt such output. In this paper we argue that adding such algorithmic controls can be a potent strategy to create explainable AI and t...

The datafication and digital transformation of society change design professions on a profound level. With data and machine intelligence being the design material of the future, the Master program Data-Driven Design, developed at HU Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, prepares the next generation of designers to handle the challenges and opport...

Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing, Blockchain, and the Internet of Things, have become salient topics across different news media outlets around the globe. This potentially shapes how broader media audiences perceive these technologies and relevant actors. While private companies that drive technology developments operate on a gl...

The refugee and migration crisis triggered transnational media discourses that included social networking media. Platforms such as Instagram became sites for political communication and framing, especially in the form of visuals that shape the crisis’ imagery. This chapter investigates how Instagram served as a window to the crisis; more specifical...

It is claimed that the Syrian War is the most socially mediated war in history thus far. This paper explores how the Syrian War is framed and discussed in YouTube, which has become a central stage for reporting and discussing the conflict in a global-transnational setting. The case study focuses on the coverage of the alleged chemical attacks in Kh...

The introduction sets the context by outlining the goals and scope of the book and emphasises the international outlook and focus on research practices and methodologies. It provides a brief account of recent developments in the field that highlight why the discipline and its methods constantly re-invent themselves but also why traditional method w...

This book provides a selection of international perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of media and communications research with emphasis placed on methodological approaches and new research domains. It includes critical reflections on how to conduct research on digital media culture, especially concerning the potentials and limitations for mi...

In 2016, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. The right-wing support online was particularly of influence in this event. Indeed, some argued that the biggest winner of the 2016 US presidential election was the ‘“alt-right’, an extreme right-wing community that communicates through online image boards like 4chan and social news s...

This book provides a detailed analysis of the transnational web sphere that emerged at the height of the Eurozone crisis between 2011 and 2013. During these turbulent years, a diverse spectrum of professional communicators from the media and political sectors as well as from opinionated individuals on blogs and social media discussed, and thus fram...

This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of online communication on the EU and Eurozone crisis discourse on the Web. It starts with mapping the general themes and topics associated with the EU in the sampled content and the network structures of hyperlinks and stakeholders. After analysing and interpreting the quantitative data, the chapter m...

Research on transnational media is still a niche area in communications and political science but the number of empirical analyses increased noticeably over the past decade. To understand transnational online discourses, it is indispensable to critically review previous theories, models, and findings on transnational media communication and its rol...

The chapter outlines the methodological approach and research design. The Web sphere analysis combines frame and network analyses, which are based on a quantitative-qualitative content analysis of online communication sampled from relevant online platforms. After introducing the methods and describing the sample, each analytical step is briefly exp...

This chapter critically reviews the impact of online communication on public discourses and refines the research angle on digital public spheres as discursive contexts based on online platforms. The Web left a lasting impact on public communication and provided a diversity of communicators with gateways to audiences. However, pluralisation is accom...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how the transnational discourse on the migrant crisis materialized on Twitter; it analyses how different stakeholders make use of online platforms to engage in the transnational digital public sphere in a crisis context. Design/methodology/approach The case study combines insights from research on...

Dennis Nguyen employs a large qualitative–quantitative study on the Eurozone crisis Web sphere. He discusses public spheres as mediatised discourses that register and process irritations of larger societal proportions with three intrinsically linked components of modern public communication. He proposes methods for the empirical analysis of transna...

The three editors introduce the key themes of this edited volume: migration, crisis and culture in digital networks. The chapter summarises the four parts under investigation, namely theories, case studies from Mexico, China, India and Nigeria, European crisis, and digital culture and communication shifts. In addition to explaining the rationale fo...

The MIG@NET European FP7 research teams spanned eight countries examining gender, migration and digital networks (http:// www. mignetproject. eu/ ). Here the researchers outline the key findings covering migrant hybrid (online and offline) activities in three European countries: Greece, Cyprus and the UK. This European multicase study provides insi...

Bringing together contributions from the fields of sociology, media and cultural studies, arts, politics, science and technology studies, political communication theory and popular culture studies, this volume engages both with theoretical debates and detailed empirical studies, showcasing how the public sphere is transformed by digital media, and...

The sovereign debt crises in the Eurozone initiated for many European countries a period of economic turmoil that inevitably affected political discourses in a national and transnational dimension. The real threat of a collapse of the euro, the conflict between necessary integration and the preservation of sovereignty, as well as a European politic...

The Internet has become an important space for political communication, not only in national but also transnational contexts. This particularly applies for discourses related to Europe and the “EU crisis”. Various online platforms provide a diverse set of communicators with the means for initiating and/or contributing to public discussions on “Euro...

The presentation attempts to explain why and in what forms transnational public spheres materialise on the Internet. It outlines different types of transnational interaction that take place on a variety of online platforms and proposes a method for their empirical analysis based on the web sphere model (Schneider & Foot 2006) and previous research...

The global Occupy Movement has spawned a multitude of local “branches”, operating in politically and geographically limited contexts. Despite certain transnational tendencies in the general protest discourse, each of Occupy’s local offshoots seems to be framed by rather national conflicts and socio-political constellations. Online media provide in...