Justin Chun-ting Ho

about me

I am a Computational Social Scientist. I research on nationalism, with a particular focus on its construction on social media, using computational methods.

I completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. My dissertation is titled “The Rise of Hong Kong Nationalism on the Edge of Empires” and is supervised by Ross Bond and Michael Rosie. My interdisciplinary research unites theories and techniques from two academic disciplines: the Sociological theories on nationalism and computational techniques from Computer Science. If you would like to know more about my thesis, you can check out this podcast:

Currently, I am working with the Digital Communication Methods Lab at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research as a postdoctoral researcher. I work on computational methods for communication science, with a focus on computational text analysis and multi-modal (text and image) analysis.

Before Amsterdam, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Academia Sinica, the national academy of Taiwan. I work closely with Communication Data and Network Analytics Lab. My research focused on Hong Kong nationalism and social movements, with an emphasis on their online aspect.

Previously, I worked with the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, Sciences Po working on the project: "What Do 'the People' Want? Analysing Online Populist Challenges to Europe", in which I investigate how populism is promoted through digital media using computational text analysis.

Research Interests

Nationalism Studies

My dissertation is titled "The Rise of Hong Kong Nationalism on the Edge of Empires" and is supervised by Ross Bond and Michael Rosie. My interdisciplinary research unites theories and techniques from two academic disciplines: the Sociological theories on nationalism and computational techniques from Computer Science. In my dissertation, I argue that Hong Kong is situated on the edge of two great powers, Britain and China, and the interactions with them have been shaping Hongkongers’ identity and conception of nationhood throughout history. Due to the key role of social media in political communication and mobilisation in Hong Kong, I look specifically at how Hong Kong nationalism was constructed through social media. Facebook was selected as the data source due to its popularity and key roles in political movements in Hong Kong. Using computational text analysis techniques, I analysed text corpora of the posts and comments on the key nationalists’ Facebook page. In order to discern the overall discursive patterns within the corpora, Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling was used to identify the most salient topics and social network analysis was employed to explore intertopic relationship.

Computational Communication Research Methods

I am interested in computational research methods. My work involves multilingual text analysis, multi-modal (text and image) analysis, and the application of large language models for communication research.

Research Software Development

I develop software to aid computational social science research. I developped three R packages: academictwitteR, a package to collect tweets from Twitter's v2 API endpoint for the Academic Research Product Track; LIHKGr, a R Scraper for LIHKG (the Hong Kong version of Reddit); songotsti, a package for Cantonese tokenisation.

publications

Peer Reviewed Journals and Conference Proceedings

Ho, J.C. (2023) Evaluating Transferability in Multilingual Text Analyses. Computational Communication Research 5(2).
Stier, S., Froio, C. & Ho, J.C. (2023) Mainstreaming the populist radical right? Online news exposure and voting behavior in the 2019 European Parliament election. European Political Science Review.
Ho, J.C. (in press) Hong Kong Anticolonial Nationalism during the Chinese Language Campaign. China Quarterly.
Ho, J.C. (2023) The Internationalism of Stateless Nations: The case of Hong Kong. Nations and Nationalism 29(1).
Ho, J.C. (2022) Understanding Hong Kong Nationalism: A Topic Network Approach. Nations and Nationalism 28(4).
Urman, A., Ho, J.C. & Katz, S. (2021) "No Central Stage": Telegram-based activity during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. PLOS One 16(10): e0256675.
Barrie, C. & Ho, J.C. (2021) academictwitteR: an R package to access the Twitter Academic Research Product Track v2 API endpoint. Journal of Open Source Software 6(62). The Open Journal: 3272.
Brownlie, J., Ho, J.C., Dunne, N., Fernández, N. & Squirrell, T. (2021) Troubling content: Guiding discussion of death by suicide on social media. Sociology of Health & Illness 43(4), pp 607-623.
Ho, J.C. (2020) How biased is the sample? Reverse engineering the ranking algorithm of Facebook’s Graph application programming interface. Big Data & Society 7(1).
Ho, J.C. (2019) Assessing the Bias of Facebook's Graph API. ACM Hypertext and Social Media 2019.
Soldner, F., Ho, J.C., Makhortykh, M., Van der Vegt, I.W.J., Mozes, M. & Kleinberg, B. (2019) Uphill from here: Sentiment patterns in videos from left- and right-wing YouTube news channels. NLP+CSS at NAACL 2019.

Book Reviews

Ho, J.C. (2017) Book review: Dynamics of National Identity: Media and Societal Factors of What We Are. Nations and Nationalism 23(4), pp. 1004–1006.
Ho, J.C. (2016) Book review: Nationalism and Contemporary Sino-Japanese Relations: Nation-state, Frontier, and Knowledge of History. China Information 30(3), pp. 391-393.

Other Publications

Ho, J.C. (2022) Scotland: A Distinct Political Community in the United Kingdom. In: Fong, C. & Ichijo, A. (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Territorial Autonomies. Milton Park: Routledge.
Ho, J.C. (2022) Using Computational Text Analysis With Social Media Text. SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online. London: Sage.
Barrie, C. & Ho, J.C. (2022) Using the Twitter Academic API With R for Social Science Research. SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online. London: Sage.
Davidson, E., Ho, J.C. & Jamieson, L. (2019) Computational text analysis using R in Big Qual data: lessons from a feasibility study looking at care and intimacy. In: Weller, S. and Edwards, R. and Jamieson, L. & Davidson, E. (eds). Analysing large volumes of complex qualitative data - Reflections from a group of international experts. NCRM Working Paper.
Ho, J.C. (2017) Quebec nationalism: the lesson for Hong Kong. In: Fong, C. (ed). Hong Kong Reformation Theory II. Hong Kong: Chapter One Publishing. (In Chinese)
Ho, J.C. (2015) Localized liberal values: Past and present of the Hong Kong identity. In: Fong, C. (ed). Hong Kong Reformation Theory. Taipei: Azoth Books. (In Chinese)
Kwong, K. & Ho, J.C. (2015) On Hong Kong self-governing political community: A response to the liberalist. In: Fong, C. (ed). Hong Kong Reformation Theory. Taipei: Azoth Books. (In Chinese)
Wong, H, Zhang, Y., Ho, J.C. & Ng, S.L. (2016) Understanding the change in youth’s quality of life in light of the Youth Quality of Life Index. In: Chiu, S.W., Ip, J.C. & Li, H. (eds). Restless youth: Observation on Hong Kong’s new generation. Hong Kong: Chung Hwa Book Co. (In Chinese)

Conference Presentations

Ho, J.C., Froio, C. & Stier, S. (2021, August) Tweeting, or Posting, that is the Question: Measuring the Platform Effect in Political Communication on COVID-19 in the UK. Presented at ECPR General Conference 2021. Online.
Froio, C., Ho, J.C., Stier, S., Schroeder, R. & Yan, P. (2021, August) Mainstreaming Radical-right Populism? How Exposure to Nativist and Anti-establishment Media Contents Builds Discursive Opportunities for Radical Right Populist Parties. Presented at ECPR General Conference 2021. Online.
Ho, J.C. (2021, July) Understanding Hong Kong Nationalism with Topic Network. Poster presented at 38th Annual Meeting of the Political Methodology Society. Online.
Froio, C., Ho, J.C., Stier, S., Schroeder, R. & Yan, P. (2021, July) Mainstreaming Radical-right Populism? How Exposure to Nativist and Anti-establishment Media Contents Builds Discursive Opportunities for Radical Right Populist Parties. Accepted for presentation at IPSA World Congress 2021. Online.
Urman, A., Ho, J.C. & Katz, S. (2021, May) "No Central Stage": Telegram-based activity during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Presented at 2021 Annual ICA Conference. Online.
Ho, J.C. (2021, April) Hong Kong of the World: the Internationalism of Hong Kong Nationalism. Presented at The 30th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. Online.
Ho, J.C. (2021, January) Understanding Hong Kong Nationalism with Topic Network. Presented at AsianPolmeth VIII & ASQPS IX. Online.
Ho, J.C. (2019, July) A Bootstrapping Approach to Assessing the Bias of Facebook’s Graph API. Presented at International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2). Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Ho, J.C. (2018, December) Assessing the Bias of the New Facebook API. Poster presented at European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science. Cologne, Germany.
Ho, J.C. (2018, August) Facebooking Nationalism: the Construction of Hong Kong Nationalism on Facebook. Presented at the Symposium on Digital Research into Media and Politics. Hong Kong.
Ho, J.C. (2018, March) One Kingdom, Two Nations: Social Media Analysis of Scottish National Party and UK Independence Party. Presented at The 28th Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London, UK.
Ho, J.C. (2017, April) Facebooking Nationalism: the Construction of Hong Kong Nationalism on Facebook. Presented at the New Direction Conference. Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Ho, J.C. (2017, March) Hong Kong nationalism: “New nationalism” with “old roots”. Presented at The 27th Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism. London, UK.
Ho, J.C. (2017, March) “Like of the same”: Facebook like-network of the 2016 Hong Kong Legislative Council Election. Presented at General Online Research 2017. Berlin, Germany.
Ho, J.C. (2016, June) Constructing the Hong Kong Nation: Cultural Nationalism and Civic Nationalism. Presented at The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies 2016. Kobe, Japan.

experience

SEP 2023 - Present

postdoctoral researcher

University of Amsterdam

Amsterdam, Netherlands

Working with the Digital Communication Methods Lab, Amsterdam School of Communication Research.
JAN 2022 - AUG 2023

postdoctoral fellow

ACADEMIA SINICA

Taipei, Taiwan

Working on the project: "Understanding Hong Kong Social Movement through the Lens of Stateless Nationalism". I investigate how the relationship between Hong Kong nationalism and social movements, with an emphasis on their online aspect.

JAN 2022 - AUG 2023

postdoctoral fellow
AUG 2020 - Jan 2022

postdoctoral research fellow

SCIENCES PO

Paris, France

Working on the project: "What Do 'the People' Want? Analysing Online Populist Challenges to Europe". I investigate how populism is promoted through digital media using computational text analysis.
OCT 2019 - JUL 2020

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Developed training programme for the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture & Society to meet the research needs of academic staffs and PhD students. Led training workshops on computational social science skills, including introduction to R and Python programming, Text Analysis, Data Visualization, Statistical Analysis, and so on.

OCT 2019 - JUL 2020

TRAINING FELLOW
MAR 2019 – JUN 2019

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER

Leichester, United Kingdom

Provided research support for research project, Big Data Analysis of Mental Health Discussion on Chinese Microblogging site Weibo. Conduct Chinese tokenization and analyze data with several kinds of Text Analysis techniques. Pre-processed the data with R.
UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER

Winchester, United Kingdom

Provided research support for research project, Nostalgia in the Social Media. Developed software to harvest Twitter data

JUL 2018 – JUL 2018

RESEARCH ASSISTANT
JUL 2018 – JUL 2018

RESEARCH ASSISTANT

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Provided research support for the ESRC funded projects, Working Across Qualitative Longitudinal Studies: a feasibility study looking at care and intimacy and A Shared Space and A Space for Sharing (funded by EMoTICON programme). Analysed text data with Topic Modelling, Keyword Analysis, and Cluster Analysis.
CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

Hong Kong

Conducted literature review, designed research plans, coordinated and performed data analysis with various advanced quantitative methods. Used Instrumental Variable to estimate the effect of income on subjective wellbeing for the research project, Using Wellbeing Data in the Valuation of Non-Market Goods: Exploring its Applicability for Use in Hong Kong and China.

FEB 2015 – SEP 2016

RESEARCH ASSISTANT