Research Interests

Natural language processing
Computational Social Science
Causal Inference with observational data
Modeling complex socio‑psychological phenomena (e.g., reinforcements loops of conspiracy beliefs) with digital trace data
Effects of moderation and algorithmic content curation

Recent Talks

(22/05/2024) 16^th ACM Web Science Conference 2024. Reflecting on the Web, AI, and Society. Stuttgart.
Talk and Poster: Conspiracy Narratives on Voat: A Longitudinal Analysis of Cognitive Activation and Evolutionary Psychology Features. https://doi.org/10.1145/3614419.3644019
(20/07/2023) IC2S2–International Conference on Computational Social Science. Copenhagen
Conspiracy Theorizing: Self-reinforcing Feedback Loops through Online Expressions
(2023) BIGSSS Summer School in Computational Social Science. Bremen.
10-day advanced NLP and data science hackathon with PhD students. Research Incubators on Data-Driven Modeling of Conflicts, Migration, Social Cohesion, and Democratic Debate.
Project Leader and Lecturer for: Simulating Conspiracy Beliefs through Large Language Models and Evolutionary Psychology.
(12/09/2022) CPSS-Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Political Text Analysis. Potsdam
Theory-driven modelling of complex socio-psychological constructs in text. Invited Panel-Discussion.

Batzdorfer, V. (2024, May). Conspiracy Narratives on Voat: A Longitudinal Analysis of Cognitive Activation and Evolutionary Psychology Features. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference (pp. 42-47).
Batzdorfer, V., Steinmetz, H., Biella, M. et al. Conspiracy theories on Twitter: emerging motifs and temporal dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Int J Data Sci Anal 13, 315–333 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-021-00298-6