The Department of Journalism and Mass Communication (JMC) at American International University–Bangladesh (AIUB) organized a webinar titled “Messy Data, Big Questions: Social Science in the Computational Age” on March 5, 2026.
The session featured Dr Christina Monzer, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Politics, Identities and Communication Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, as the keynote speaker.
The webinar was attended by Prof Dr Abdur Rahman, Pro-Vice Chancellor of AIUB, Prof Dr AJM Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan, Adviser to the JMC Department, and Prof Dr Pradip Kumar Panday, Head of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication, along with faculty members and students.
Assistant Professor Nasrin Akter hosted the program.
The session began with a welcome speech delivered by Prof Dr Pradip Kumar Panday, who emphasized the importance of integrating emerging research methods and interdisciplinary perspectives into journalism and communication education.
In his remarks, Pro-Vice Chancellor Prof Dr Abdur Rahman emphasized that in the age of unprecedented information flow, misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation pose serious threats to the information ecosystem, and that mass communication professionals have a crucial role in addressing these challenges.
Prof Dr AJM Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan noted that introducing journalism and communication students to new ideas and approaches such as computational research is essential for their academic and professional development.
In her presentation, Dr Christina Monzer discussed the promises and challenges of Computational Social Science (CSS).
She explained how researchers can leverage large-scale digital data—often repurposed from online platforms—to explore important social questions.
However, she cautioned against the “seduction of scale,” noting that large datasets can create false confidence, as platform users do not necessarily represent the broader population and online behavior is often shaped by platform algorithms.
Dr Monzer also addressed key challenges in the field, including the replication crisis in computational research, ethical concerns related to online privacy and data scraping, and limited access to platform data due to corporate control and regulatory restrictions. She encouraged students and aspiring researchers to develop interdisciplinary skills by learning programming languages such as Python or R, along with data management, statistics, visualization, and causal inference methods.
The webinar concluded with an interactive discussion session where students and faculty engaged with the speaker on the future of computational methods in journalism and communication research.