How to identify medium and platform issues when using chatbots for research.

Arrangementes holdes på engelsk

Chatbots have become a ‘part of the pipeline’ in a number of research methodologies in the social sciences and humanities, contributing to classification, annotation, sourcing and new, synthetic data.

One question is how to go about using chatbots in the first place for such research tasks, and make use of the many best practice guides that have been shared across the research landscape. How does one gain confidence in how the chatbots work for the researchers? What to do when the machine and the researcher findings misalign?

When gaining confidence in the chatbot output, one could consider how to ground chatbot findings. These moments raise a series of questions such as when to undertake a manual and/or multiple chatbot comparison. But it would also ask, how does the medium or the platform affect the data and the findings? Here is where guardrail auditing comes into the picture.

How to detect the guardrails that have been put up by the chatbots so that they can interact with users without offence? How do they affect the quality of the data and the findings?

The lecture is dedicated to identifying medium and platform issues when using chatbots for research.

Speaker:

Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam and Director of the Digital Methods Initiative, Humanities Labs. He is author, most recently, of Doing Digital Methods (Sage, 2024), co-author of Digital Methods: A Short Introduction (Polity, 2025) and editor of Content Moderation across Social Media Platforms (Routledge, 2026).

————

The event is a collaboration between the #WARS project at CMI and the AI Stories project at the Center for Digital Narrative at UiB.