Tom Nicholls specialises in computational political communication and gets most excited by work at the intersection of at the intersection of politics, news, public policy, and the online world. His main research interests include the analysis of news texts using computational methods and the development of new methods for studying political behaviour online. A current focus of research is developing new methods for automatically extracting media frames from large corpora of news articles.
Prior to starting work at the University of Liverpool, Tom was a postdoc at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, both at the University of Oxford. He completed his DPhil studying local government use of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2016. Before returning to academia, he worked in performance improvement and project management roles for Darlington Borough Council and headed up the outreach team for British Quakers. He graduated from Leeds University with a degree in Politics and Parliamentary Studies in 2003.
Analysis of news texts using computational methods; development of new methods for studying political behaviour online; developing new methods for automatically extracting media frames from large corpora of news articles.
This research programme aims to assess where political science understanding, knowledge and theory should be re-examined and developed in light of widespread use of the Internet, and to develop methodologies to study online behaviour.
This project aims to enhance JISC's UK Web Domain archive, a 30 TB archive of the .uk country-code top level domain collected from 1996 to 2010. It will extract link graphs from the data and disseminate social science research using the collection.
Director, Associate Professor, Senior Policy Fellow
Victoria Nash is the OII's Director and a Senior Policy Fellow. Her research focuses on the opportunities and risks experienced by children using digital technologies; she also leads OII engagement on Internet regulation and digital policy issues.
Professor of Society and the Internet
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet, a political scientist specialising in digital government and politics. She was Director of the OII from 2011-18. She is a Professorial Fellow of Mansfield College.
