3 Doctoral Candidates at University of Antwerp

The three PhD candidates will collaborate in an interdisciplinary GOA project called “Understanding Ideological Bias through Data-Driven Methods”. Ideological bias concerning age, gender, ethnicity and social class is one of the most important ethical concerns in contemporary society. From racism in social media, over sexism in advertising, to ageism and class prejudice in societal governance: all human interaction is structured by bias on explicit and implicit levels. Recent studies have demonstrated that novel machine learning methods (from A.I.) not only capture but amplify the ideological biases in the data they are trained on. The current project aims to strategically turn this undesirable property to our advantage. By analyzing a large corpora of historical data (c.1800-c. 1940) through state-of-the-art digital humanities methods, we aim to elicit implicit patterns and trends relating to ideological bias and confront these with received knowledge. By being embedded in recent cognitive studies, the project will be able to make claims on how implicit bias functioned in the past, understanding better what people thought and how such thinking structured behavioral interactions with their surrounding world.