Dr Liliana Bounegru

Biography

Liliana Bounegru is Lecturer in Digital Methods at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. Previously she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford). Since 2013 she has been a researcher at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam), where she also acted as Managing Director between 2014 and 2016. She is also a research associate at the Sciences Po Paris médialab, where she was a visiting researcher and lecturer in 2016. She obtained her double PhD degree (cum laude) from the University of Groningen and Ghent University. She co-founded the Public Data Lab, a network of research labs which seeks to facilitate research, democratic engagement and public debate around the future of the data society. In parallel to her academic work, she was Data Journalism Program Lead at the European Journalism Centre.

Her work covers new media, digital culture, digital journalism, data journalism and digital methods, and has been published in New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, Visual Communication and Digital Journalism.  She is co-editor of The Data Journalism Handbook (O’Reilly Media, 2012; University of Amsterdam Press, forthcoming), translated into fifteen languages. She is co-investigator of A Field Guide to Fake News and Other Information Disorders, a transnational, multi-institutional research collaboration to develop digital methods to trace the circulation of political misinformation, junk news, memes and trolling practices online (also available in Japanese).

She has taught courses in digital methods, data journalism, digital journalism and controversy mapping at King’s College London, the University of Siegen, University of Amsterdam, Sciences Po and the Paris School of International Affairs.

More about her can be found at lilianabounegru.org.

Research interests and PhD supervision

Her research interests include intersections between the following topics: digital media, digital culture, digital journalism, data journalism, climate change, misinformation, and the following approaches: inventive methods for new media research, digital methods for social and cultural studies, infrastructure studies, platform studies, issue mapping and controversy mapping. 

Liliana welcomes PhD applications related to the above.

Teaching

Liliana is involved in teaching courses on digital methods for social and cultural studies, data journalism, digital journalism, audience studies, visual methodologies and information visualisation.

Expertise and public engagement

Liliana also has a professional background in media and journalism. In parallel to her academic work, she led the data journalism unit at the European Journalism Centre, where she designed and coordinated massive open online courses (MOOCs), online publications, conferences and trainings. She has contributed to the Harvard Business Review, BuzzFeed News, PBS MediaShift, and the Nieman Lab, and her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Asahi Shimbun, Columbia Journalism Review and Global Voices.

Selected publications

• Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Venturini, T. (2019). ‘Fake News’ as Infrastructural Uncanny. New Media & Society. In press.
• Bounegru, L., Gray, J., Venturini, T. & Mauri, M. (Co-investigators). (2018). A Field Guide to “Fake News” and Other Information Disorders. Amsterdam: Public Data Lab.
• Gray, J., Gerlitz, C., & Bounegru, L. (2018). Data Infrastructure Literacy. Big Data & Society, 5(2), 1–13.
• Bounegru, L., Venturini, T., Gray, J., & Jacomy, M. (2017). Narrating Networks: Exploring the Affordances of Networks as Storytelling Devices in Journalism. Digital Journalism, 5(6), 699–730. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2016.1186497
• Gray, J., Bounegru, L., & Chambers, L. (Eds.). (2012). The Data Journalism Handbook: How Journalists Can Use Data to Improve the News (1st ed). Sebastopol: O'Reilly Media.
• Bounegru, L., & Forceville, C. (2011). Metaphors in Editorial Cartoons Representing the Global Financial Crisis. Visual Communication. 10 (2): 209-229.