Liliana Bounegru examines how digital technologies shape and are shaped by culture and society, and develops methods, infrastructures and approaches for critically investigating and reimagining their role in collective life. She has led and contributed to widely cited research on critical data practices, data infrastructure literacy, digital methods, online mis/disinformation and multimodal metaphor.

At King's she co-leads the Digital Investigations Lab and the KingsCAT research infrastructure. She is currently Principal Investigator on the Horizon Europe project COMPASS (Countering Manipulation while Preserving Authentic Speech and Society, 2026–2029), and is developing research on AI investigative cultures, Eastern European feminist technocultures and Korean platform cultures. She is also a research associate at the médialab, Sciences Po and the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, and co-founder of the Public Data Lab, an experimental space for critical, creative, socially engaged research with and about data, digital media, software, platforms, infrastructures and the internet.

Since joining King's, she has led and contributed to international research projects funded by EU’s Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 programmes, UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Her work has been published in journals including New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Social Media + Society, Digital Journalism and Visual Communication. She co-edits the Digital Studies book series (Routledge), serves on the advisory board of CAT4SMR (Capture and Analysis Tools for Social Media Research) and has served on the editorial board of Digital Journalism. She has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the University of Potsdam (Henriette Herz Fellowship), Oslo Metropolitan University and King's Digital Futures Institute, and has given keynotes, talks and workshops across Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Critical engagements with datafication, platformisation and AI, including their cultural, political economic, material and historical dimensions.

• Digital technologies, AI and environmental politics.

• Alternative and feminist technocultures in global contexts (e.g. post-socialist Eastern Europe and South Korea).

• Methodological innovation combining digital, visual, multimodal, participatory and creative approaches, including digital methods for visual network exploration, soundscaping, situational analysis, online image analysis and historical digital media research.

Over more than a decade, Liliana’s research has investigated the mutual shaping of digital technologies, cultures, societies and ecologies, with particular attention to how power operates through socio-technical systems and how these systems are critically investigated, challenged and reimagined. She works across science and technology studies (particularly feminist technoscience), internet and platform studies.

Her research began with critical studies of datafication and platformisation in journalism, activism and digital research and has subsequently developed towards AI systems, environmental politics and feminist technocultures in global contexts (e.g. post-socialist Eastern Europe and South Korea).

She welcomes PhD enquiries across these areas.

Teaching

Liliana convenes and teaches across digital methods, data journalism, digital investigations and creative computation, combining critical and conceptual inquiry with hands-on experimentation with digital methods and tools. Her teaching is shaped by engaged research-led teaching, an approach she co-developed that brings together teaching, research and societal engagement by creating opportunities for collaborative and reflexive collective inquiry into real-world issues in the classroom. Student projects so far have involved organisations including First Draft, the European Forest Institute, Global Witness, Surrey Wildlife Trust and the Forest Bathing Institute and have contributed to outputs published by BuzzFeed News, Politico Europe, Media Matters and the European Journalism Centre. This approach is documented in a peer-reviewed publication on engaged research-led teaching. More recently, she has extended this approach through Growing Group Care, a student-staff collaboration developing resources for caring and inclusive group work, and by using digital media research infrastructures such as KingsCAT to support collaborative engaged research and learning.

Expertise and public engagement

Engaged research is central to Liliana’s work and she regularly collaborates with journalists, civil society, community groups and environmental organisations to develop investigations, methods and resources around digital media and issues of public concern. Her research on online misinformation underpinned her department’s REF 2021 impact case study, with resources such as A Field Guide to ‘Fake News’ and Other Information Disorders supporting investigations by BuzzFeed News, First Draft and Media Matters for America, and referenced by the BBC, UNESCO, Le Monde and Transparency International. Her environmental research has included collaborations with the European Forest Institute, Global Witness and others, including the Forest Storytelling and Engagement for Change Toolkit. More recently, she collaborated with the Internet Archive on the use of web archives in journalistic investigations, producing Follow the Changes: 9 Ways Web Archives are Used in Digital Investigations. She also experiments with creative public engagement through performances, exhibitions and workshops, with work presented at Science Gallery London and the Curiosity Cabinet at King’s in partnership with The Courtauld.

Selected publications

• Bounegru, L. & Gray, J. (eds) (2021). The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice. 2nd edition. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. [open access]
• Bounegru, L. (2023). The platformisation of software development: Connective coding and platform vernaculars on GitHub. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565231205867. [open access]
• Marres, N., Colombo, G., Bounegru, L., Gray, J. W. Y., Gerlitz, C., & Tripp, J. (2023). Testing and Not Testing for Coronavirus on Twitter: Surfacing Testing Situations Across Scales With Interpretative Methods. Social Media + Society, 9(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196538 [open access]
• Anthony G. B., Chun, W. H. K., Bounegru, L., Devries, M., Harris, A., holtzclaw, H., Jucan, I., Juhasz, A., Kamish, D. W., Langlois, G., Proctor, J., Tomlinson, C., Vasudevan, R., & Weltevrede, E. (2023). Algorithmic Authenticity. Meson Press. [open access]
• Gray, J., Gerlitz, C. & Bounegru, L. (2018) “Data Infrastructure Literacy”. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718786316 [open access]