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About

Communication

THE DSI COMMUNITY COMMUNICATION

The DSI Community Communication focuses on research related to communicative challenges in a digital society.
Our vision is a digital society that exploits the full potential of communication while avoiding negative outcomes.

We aim to realize this goal by working as an interdisciplinary collaboration platform that is open for all UZH researchers and affiliates interested in contributing to our mission, thus serving the Zurich, Swiss, and international society. By focusing on technological, social, psychological, economic, ethical, political, legal, and linguistic aspects of communication, we research three main challenges:

  • News: e.g., algorithms, trust, user generated content and its moderation, …
  • Social Relations: e.g., social influence/support, collaboration, …
  • Entertainment: e.g., e-sports, streaming services, …
Why?

Why?

Realizing the potential of information and communication technologies requires a comprehensive understanding of its functional and dysfunctional implications.
What?

What?

The DSI Community Communication aims to understand, deliberate about, and shape communication and its societal implications in a digital society.
How?

How?

In the community we coordinate activities in research, teaching, and society outreach to maximize and accelerate the impact for digital society.

Community facts

23

Projects

33

Members

THE DIGITAL SOCIETY INITIATIVE (DSI)

What questions about digitalization are on your mind? And how has your life changed with the digital transformation? Digitalization is presenting society and science with new challenges. It is taking hold of a large part of our lives at an ever faster pace.

The Digital Society Initiative (DSI) shapes the digital transformation of society and science. With interdisciplinary activities in research, education and outreach, the DSI is the University of Zurich’s (UZH) competence center on digital transformation.

The DSI is a scientific institution supported by all faculties of the UZH, which promotes independent scientific reflection and innovation on questions of digital transformation. It prepares UZH students to help shape the digital transformation, engages in regular discourse with the public and supports policy-making on digital transformation issues.

Understanding Communication

Our vision is a digital society that exploits the full potential of communication while avoiding negative outcomes.

The DSI Community Communication was founded in 2017. Since then, we examined the phenomenon of digital communication through various interdisciplinary projects, workshops, meetings, and other events.

As members get a chance to present their current projects or future project ideas, the community itself serves as a platform for communication, as researchers are given feedback, notes, and new ideas by other researchers independent of their discipline. Furthermore, the community connects members with similar interests for future research.

Apart from research projects the community serves as a platform to share knowledge. Education is an important part of our community; therefore, we offer workshops focusing on different knowledge areas e.g. computational data analysis.

The DSI has a certain budget for every community. With these funds they are financing community intern projects. This year three of our proposals received funding:


Prof. Dr. Thomas N. Friemel and Nico Pfiffner are working on developing a data donation framework that will help researchers to support citizens becoming data donors. For more information on the project click here.

Dr. Sarah Geber received the DSI Fellowship for her project Tracing Technology Acceptance during the Covid-19 Pandemic: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives. For more information about her project click here.

In this workshop, Dr. Gerold Schneider and Dr. Martin Wettstein present key current methods and use them hands-on in R and other tools. The methods comprise, but are not limited to: Keyword extraction, Collocations, Topic Modeling, Network analysis, Conceptual maps.

Know more about our work.

To understand communication in a digital world, our members conduct various project.

Get in touch

Questions, inputs or just want to get to know us? Contact us here.

Membership in the DSI Community Communication is open to researchers affiliated with a Swiss university. For other individuals, membership is conditional on an ongoing cooperation with the DSI Community. To become a member of a DSI Community, membership in the DSI Network is required. Please follow this link.

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