Justin Chun-ting Ho

Computational Social Science, Social Media, Nationalism

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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.

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.

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Research Interests

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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.

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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.

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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

Book Reviews

Other Publications

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.

education

2009 - 2012

BSocSc in Government and Public Admin.

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Minor in Sociology.

2012 - 2013

MSc in Political Theory

London School of Economics and Political Science

London, United Kingdom

Dissertation researched Chinese nationalism and its conflict with the Hong Kong identity.

2016 - 2021

PhD in Sociology

University of Edinburgh

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Supervised by Mr Ross Bond and Dr Michael Rosie. Dissertation title: The Rise of Hong Kong Nationalism on the Edge of Empires.

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

Awards and Grants

Awards

  • 2022: 2022 (1st Session) Academia Sinica Postdoctoral Research Scholars
  • 2021: Best Student Paper (Runner-up), Chinese Internet Research Conference
  • 2019: Gray Scholarship Award, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh
  • 2018: Best Poster Presentation, European Symposium on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science
  • 2018: Honourable Mention, Summer School Series on Methods for Computational Social Science

Grants

  • 2021: SAGE Concept Grant, SAGE Publishing
  • 2019: Travel Grant, 5th International Conference on Computational Social Science
  • 2018: Travel Grant, European Symposium on Societal Challenges in Computational Social Science, GESIS
  • 2018: Travel Grant, Summer School Series on Methods for Computational Social Science, GESIS
  • 2018: PhD Research Support Fund, University of Edinbrurgh
  • 2017: Travel Grant, International Political Science Association
  • 2017: Digital Scholarship Training Bursaries, University of Edinbrurgh