The Growing Importance of Coding in Communication Science

In this episode, Emese Domahidi (Assistant Professor at TU Ilmenau) and Mario Haim (Professor at LMU Munich) discuss with Jacob T. Fisher (Assistant Professor at the U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) about the role of coding for communication scholars. Jacob just co-organized (along with Josephine Lukito, Frederic R. Hopp, and Felicia Loecherbach) the first ICA Hackathon and talks about his experience at the event in the podcast. From there, we tackle topics such as what programming and developing actually are and how to teach coding skills in a way that makes sense for the social sciences, what knowledge we need to be able to collaborate with computer scientists, whether we need computer scientists in the first place, and what programming language(s) communication scholars should learn. Additionally, we discuss how to use and sell this knowledge in business and how programming is a challenge at different career levels.

References

The ICA 2022 Pre-conference Hackathon: Opening Communication Science. https://www.hackingcommsci.org/

van Atteveldt, W., Trilling, D., & Arcila, C. (in press). Computational Analysis of Communication. Wiley Blackwell. Book homepage: https://cssbook.net/