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Profile

Bertie Vidgen is a post-doctoral researcher  within the Alan Turing Institute’s public policy programme and a Research Associate at the OII. His main research focuses on detecting, analysing, and countering online hate speech, examining it in the context of both news and social media. He primarily uses computational social science methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and statistical modelling.

Before he joined the Turing, Bertie studied for a DPhil at the OII, where he researched Islamophobic hate speech among followers of UK political parties on Twitter. He is particularly interested in understanding how Islamophobia manifests across the political spectrum (including both mainstream and far right parties) as well as its temporal dynamics. He is actively interested in the use of computational methods in social science, the ethical challenges of using social media data, and the role of social media within politics. He holds a BA from the University of Warwick in History and Politics and an MA from the University of Essex in Ideology and Discourse Analysis. Bertie’s other work includes consulting, advising, and teaching.

Keywords: Islamophobia, online politics, computational social science, machine learning

 

Positions held at the OII

  • Research Associate, October 2019-
  • DPhil student, October 2015 – July 2019

Supervisors at the OII

Research

Videos

  • A New Approach To Defining Extremism

    Recorded: 31 March 2016

    Duration: 00:16:46

    Bertie Vidgen argues that current definitions of extremism are severely limited. They are posed as certainties rather than probabilities, and this makes them incapable of capturing the complexity of social reality.

Blog