Johannes B. Gruber

Background

I am a Post-Doc Researcher at the Department of Communication Science at the ~~University of Amsterdam~~ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam working on the NEWSFLOWS project (the project was recently moved to the VU). Previously, I worked at the Department of Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam within the OPTED project and a focus on text as data methods and creating open source software tools to make these methods easily accessible and reproducible. Previously, I worked as Post-Doc Researcher at the Chair for Digital Democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS), European University Viadrina Foundation Frankfurt (Oder). In 2021, I passed my PhD in Politics at the University of Glasgow.

In my PhD project, I scrutinised how the media in the UK portrays protest events. Most literature about the topic assumes that the messages of protests are delegitimised by the media through routinised framing, i.e. a focus on disruption by and deviance of protesters. In my project, I collected all newspaper articles published in selected UK newspaper outlets that mention a protest in the UK over a 26 year period (1992-2017; N > 27,000) and analysed the content using an innovative approach to framing analysis that combines best-practice manual coding techniques with supervised machine learning.

After a detour that included a Master on Political Theory, I realised during my Master in Political Communication — which was originally planned as a semester abroad — how much I love working with data. Especially R, the free software environment for statistical computing and graphics, is captivating much of my attention nowadays and has helped me to combine my two most long-standing passions: Political Science and fiddling with computers. I’m using R to do nearly everything (including writing my thesis and this website).

Interests

Computational Social Science
Quantitative Text Analysis
Protest and Democracy
News Media
Hiking
Photography
Motorcycling
Linux

Education

PhD in Politics, 2021

University of Glasgow
MSc Political Communication, 2015

University of Glasgow
MA Political Theory, 2017

Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main & TU Darmstadt
BA Political Science; Economics and Economic Studies in History, 2012

RWTH Aachen-University

The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to a more systematic understanding of how mainstream news media in liberal democracies report about protests.

This article provides a detailed analysis of the roles and interactions between different types of media and how they were used by political and advocacy elites. It explores what happened in the different parts of the system, and thus the paths to attention that led to setting this issue in the political and media agendas. The analysis of the case, a partial policy reversal in the United Kingdom provoked by an immigration scandal known as the “Windrush scandal” reveals that the issue was pushed into the agenda by a campaign assemblage of investigative journalism, political and advocacy elites, and digitally enabled leaders. The legacy news media came late but were crucial..

Software

traktok

The goal of traktok is to provide easy access to TikTok data

cookiemonster

Your Friendly Solution to Managing Browser Cookies

atr

The goal of atr is to wrap the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol) behind Bluesky. And we have actually already fulfilled this goal!

rwhatsapp

rwhatsapp is a small yet robust package that provides some infrastructure to work with WhatsApp text data in R. WhatsApp seems to become increasingly important not just as a messaging service but also as a social network—thanks to its group chat capabilities. This package is intended to make the first step of analysing WhatsApp text data as easy as possible: reading your chat history into R. This should work, no matter which device or locale you used to retrieve the txt or zip file containing your conversations.

askgpt

You’re new to R? You don’t quite understand the code you copied from that tutorial? You get error messages that make no sense to you? Don’t worry, just askgpt!

paperboy

The philosophy of paperboy is that the package is a comprehensive collection of webscraping scripts for news media sites. Many data scientists and researchers write their own code when they have to retrieve news media content from websites. At the end of research projects, this code is often collecting digital dust on researchers hard drives instead of being made public for others to employ. paperboy offers writers of webscraping scripts a clear path to publish their code and earn co-authorship on the package. For users, the promise is simple: paperboy delivers news media data from many websites in a consistent format.

LexisNexisTools

My PhD supervisor once told me that everyone doing newspaper analysis starts by writing code to read in files from the “LexisNexis” newspaper archive. However, while I do recommend this exercise, not everyone has the time. This package provides functions to read in TXT, RTF, DOC and PDF files downloaded from the old “LexisNexis” or DOCX from the new Nexis Uni, Lexis Advance and similar services. The package also comes with a few other features that should be useful while working with data from the popular newspaper archive.

wallpapr

wallpapr is a little toy R package to make desktop and phone backgrounds using ggplot2. The design is inspired (aka copied one-to-one) by the beautiful calender wallpapers of Emma. You can check out her wallpapers at: emmastudies.com/tagged/download. With this package you can create your own calender wallpapers using an input image.

Jan 18, 2024 7 min read

Building the R-Bloggers Bluesky Bot with atrrr and GitHub Actions

Bluesky is shaping up to be a nice, “billionaire-proof”1 replacement of what Twitter once was. One of the things the community was still missing, in my opinion, was the R-Bloggers bot that once spread the news about new R blog posts on ex-Twitter. Especially when first learning R, this was an important resource for me and I created my first package using a post from R-Bloggers. Since I have recently published the atrrr package with a few friends, I thought re-creating the bot that posted new entries was a good opportunity to promote that package and show how you can write a completely free bot with it.

Jan 15, 2024 3 min read

Poor Dude’s Janky Bluesky Feed Reader CLI Via atrrr

Have you ever wanted to see your favourite social media posts in your command line? No? Me neither, but at least hrbrmstr has a few months ago. Or to be honest, I don’t know which social media site he prefers, but Bluesky is currently my favourite. With the ease of use and algorithmic curation that I loved about Twitter before its demise and the super interesting and easy to work with AT protocol, which should make Bluesky “billionaire-proof”1, I’m hopeful that this social network it here to stay.

Jan 9, 2024 2 min read

Release: `atrrr`, a wrapper for the AT protocol behind ’Bluesky’

I’m happy to announce that atrrr has made its way to CRAN. The purpose of atrrr is to communicate with the Authenticated transfer protocol (atproto for short), which powers the Twitter replacement social media site Bluesky. I think there are two things that are especially interesting about the package: it gives near limitless access to a social network site from R the backbone of the package was written mostly automatically The first point will make this interesting for teaching, as the well of interesting data that the Twitter research API once was has tried out, thanks to a certain billionaire.

Dec 4, 2023 4 min read

Re-Release: `traktok`

I’m happy to announce that traktok, my package to get content from TikTok, has returned from the dead. That’s slightly exaggerated, because it actually always worked in some shape or form, but up until about September, the most recent state on Github had very limited functionality. Now I extended the package substantially and also gave it an appealing home on a pkgdown site here: https://jbgruber.github.io/traktok/. The main issue I had before, namely that some requests to the unofficial TikTok API need to be signed, still remains unresolved.

Sep 6, 2023 3 min read

CRAN Download counts

I really like developing software and making my own life and work easier with it. But what I enjoy even more is to see others actually use it! So every now and then I look at CRAN download counts of my R packages. I’m not in any top-10 rankings or anything. But that was also never the point. I just like sharing my knowledge and see others use it!