Bertram Vidgen is an OII DPhil student. His research focuses on far-right extremism in online contexts.

Email: bertie.vidgen@oii.ox.ac.uk
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Bertie Vidgen is a PhD student at the University of Oxford, funded by the ESRC Grand Union. His work draws on political science theory and computational methods to understand Islamophobic hate speech on social media. His research interests include online political behaviour, political communication and computational social science. He is particularly interested in how advanced methods, such as machine learning and natural language processing, can be used to provide insights into social problems, including extremism, offensive speech and the spread of dangerous ideas. He has been awarded an enrichment studentship at the Alan Turing Institute (London), a placement at the Boston Consulting Group and ESRC research network funding. He has consulted for several companies, designed and taught on courses at the Oxford Internet Institute and organised several conferences and datahacks.

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

 

Positions held at the OII

  • DPhil student, October 2015 –

Supervisors at the OII


Latest blog posts

Current projects

  • 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.