Research Areas

Citizen discussions about politics in the comment sections of online news media outlets are a popular form of online participation. The aim of Jun. Prof. Ziegele's junior research group “Deliberative Discussions in the Social Web” is to investigate and develop new computer-assisted measures of discussion moderation and aggregation. These measures aim at improving the civility, the deliberative quality, and the deliberative effects of citizens’ online debates. The research design provides for a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods as well as computational methods. These will be implemented in interdisciplinary cooperation and in practical cooperation.

Academic Career

From 2005 to 2009, Marc Ziegele studied media management at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and worked simultaneously for numerous print and online media. Also in Mainz, he earned his doctorate in 2015, on the "Discussion Value of Online News" and continued working there as a research assistant. In the beginning of 2018, he was appointed Junior Professor for Political Online Communication at the Institute for Social Sciences, Department of Communication and Media Studies at HHU. Here he heads the junior research group "Deliberative Discussions on the Social Web" within the framework of the Digital Society funding line of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

• NRW-Junior Research Group DEDIS, 2018
• Top Faculty Paper Award of the Journalism Division of the International Communication Association (joint publication with Oliver Quiring), 2017
• Research award of the Friends of the University, University of Mainz for an outstanding PhD thesis, 2016
• Best Paper Award, The "Media Reception and Effects" division of the German Association of Communication (DGPuK), 2016
• Award of the Forschungsschwerpunkt Medienkonvergenz for the best dissertation completed at the University of Mainz in the field of media convergence, 2015