Alexandra Rottenkolber

Alexandra is a PhD Student in Analytical Sociology/Computational Social Sciences at Linköping University, Sweden. She holds Master’s Degrees in Social Data Science (University of Oxford, UK) and Public Policy (Hertie School, Germany), as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Physics and Geography (University of Heidelberg, Germany).

For her research, Alexandra uses a variety of different methodological approaches ranging from natural language processing, complex network analysis, and machine learning techniques to classical statistical methods. In her past work, she has studied attention dynamics in parliaments and worked on developing a measure of parliamentary debate openness; studied the processes of elite formation over time; and has studied gendered patterns of behavior on collaborative online platforms. In her PhD, she plans to extend and build on this existing work and look deeper into how platforms’ design choices govern actors’ interactions and potentially amplify existing structural inequalities. In addition to writing her PhD, she collaborates with Johannes Bauer (Quello Center), Fabian Braesemann (University of Oxford), and Ole Teutloff (ITU Copenhagen) on a research project tracking the digital development of countries over time. In this project, they hope to learn more about spatial digital inequalities, as well as to derive practical policy implications.