Category Archives: Academy Assistants

Call for Network Institute Academy Assistant projects

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Apply for interdisciplinary research projects with 2 student assistants
Deadline 8 June 2018 at 12.00 pm

The Network Institute’s (NI) Academy Assistants program (NIAA) is now entering its eighth year. Initially funded through a KNAW grant and aimed at combining social sciences and computer science research, it has since been adopted by the Network Institute and opened up for other interdisciplinary projects which fall within the NI’s research themes. The Academy Assistants program aims at promising high-potential master students who want to conduct scientific research and possibly pursue an academic career. Last year, six Academy Assistant proposals were funded, this year, the program will also be able to fund six to seven projects.

This is a call for new proposals to start from October 2018 onwards. The program aims to bring together scientists from different disciplines; therefore the projects must combine methods and themes from two different disciplines affiliated with the NI. For each awarded project, the program funds two student research assistants (0,2 FTE) for a period of ten months. The intended outcome of the projects should be papers and/or research proposals. In addition, at the end of the project (July 2019) we will publish proceedings of this year’s project.

Newstracker presented at DHBenelux 2015

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On June 8th, Martijn Kleppe (Faculty of Humanities) presented the set-up and first results of the Newstracker at the DHBenelux 2015 conference in Antwerp, Belgium. This tool, developed by Marco Otte of the Network Institute and supported by a Network Institute Academy Assistant aims to track the online behaviour of a group of 50 respondents. Participants installed a proxy in their web browser that tracked all visited websites. Overnight, the log file is being cleaned, only the URLs of 4.000 pre-defined websites are being saved and the textual and visual contents of news websites are being scraped and saved for later analyses. Currently, the fieldwork of the Newstracker is in its final phase and the first analyses have been made.

The Newstracker is part of the research project “The New News Consumer: User-based Innovation to Meet Paradigmatic Change in News Use and Media Habits” (see www.news-use.com), a collaboration between the VU University Amsterdam and the University of Groningen, sponsored by The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Dutch journalism organizations Buitenhof, De Persgroep Nederland, EenVandaag, EO, NCRV, NDC Mediagroep, Nieuwsuur, and NOS Nieuws. The project is led by prof. dr. Irene Costera Meijer. Tim Groot Kormelink works as PhD student on the project.

For more information about the Newstracker, please contact Martijn Kleppe.

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New Call for Network Institute Academy Assistants Projects

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The VU University Academy Assistants programme is now entering its fifth year. Initially funded through a KNAW grant and aimed at combining social sciences and computer science research, it has since been adopted by the Network Institute and opened up for other interdisciplinary projects that fall within the research themes of the institute. The Academy Assistants programme aims at interesting high-potential master students in conducting scientific research and pursuing an academic career. Last year, the programme received 30 proposals of which 12 were funded. This year, the programme will be able to fund 5 to 8 projects.Парапеты

Read more about it and download the application form here.