Details
Katharina Soemer holds an MA in Sociology and Social Research with a focus on quantitative methods from the University of Bremen, Germany, where she also studied Computer Science. She joined the research team in 2020 and has worked in different areas of the team since then. She started with Tweet annotation, was then responsible for statistical analysis, and now manages the project which still includes data analysis and research data management. Drawing on her methodological background, Katharina's academic research focuses on questions at the intersection of machine learning and antisemitism/hate speech. For her master's thesis, she explored ways to ensure annotation reliability for social data such as online antisemitism and analyzed methodological approaches to classify borderline cases. In 2022, she was invited to Bloomington as a visiting scholar and became familiar with Indiana and the Midwest. She currently lives in Berlin, Germany. In addition to her academic work on the topic, she gives lectures and workshops on antisemitism on social media to teachers, students, and the general public.
Peer-reviewed publications:
2024: Annotating live messages on social media. Testing the efficiency of the AnnotHate – live data annotation portal. In: Journal of Computational Social Science (with Günther Jikeli and Sameer Karali)
2023: The value of manual annotation in assessing trends of hate speech on social media: was antisemitism on the rise during the tumultuous weeks of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover? In: Journal of Computational Social Science Volume 6, pages 943–971 (with Günther Jikeli)
2022: Differences Between Antisemitic and Non-Antisemitic English Language Tweets. In: Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory (with Günther Jikeli, David Axelrod, Rhonda K. Fischer, Elham Forouzesh, Weejeong Jeong and Daniel Miehling)
Other publications:
2023: Antisemitic Messages? A Guide to High-Quality Annotation and a Labeled Dataset of Tweets. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.14599 (with Günther Jikeli, Sameer Karali and Daniel Miehling)
2023: Antisemitism on Twitter: A Dataset for Machine Learning and Text Analytics. https://zenodo.org/records/7932888 (with Günther Jikeli, Sameer Karali and Daniel Miehling)
2023: Hate Speech and Bias against Asians, Blacks, Jews, Latines, and Muslims: A Dataset for Machine Learning and Text Analytics. https://zenodo.org/record/8147308 (with Günther Jikeli and Sameer Karali)
2023: A German Language Labeled Dataset of Tweets. https://zenodo.org/records/10053509 (with Günther Jikeli, Sameer Karali and Daniel Miehling)
2022: Conversations About Jews on Twitter: Recent Developments Since Elon Musk’s Takeover. https://isca.indiana.edu/publication-research/social-media-project/documents-soc-media-proj/Conversations-About-Jews-on-Twitter.-Recent-Developments-Since-the-Takeover-by-Elon-Musk.pdf (with Günther Jikeli)
The College of Arts