Presented during the 2025 Digital Methods Initiative Winter School, this project aimed to explore how TikTok was used during and after the 2024 Romanian presidential elections. The project explored two approaches for critically replaying Romanian election videos: making video composites based on viral candidate soundtracks, and making post-election hashtag soundscapes. Beyond evaluating informational content, group replay formats can also highlight the everyday situations, aesthetics and affective dimensions of election TikTok videos – from sexualised lip-syncing to rousing AI anthems, sponsored micro-influencer testimonials to post-communist nationalist nostalgia.

The project team included Dr. Liliana Bounegru and Dr. Jonathan Gray (King's College London & The Public Data Lab), Dr. Elena Negrea-Busuioc (SNSPA) and Dr. Eduard Gross (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu). 

A detailed project description can be found here. 

Presented during the 2024 Digital Methods Initiative Summer School, this project sought to locate post-truth spaces in Facebook networks in the Czech, Polish, Romanian and Slovak languages, found through keyword queries concerning the Russia-Ukraine war, July, 2023-July, 2024. These countries were selected given their targeting by Russia’s influence as well as the work conducted there by fact-checkers and journalists seeking to expose them. In fact, this project aimed to contribute to methodologies that surface leads for fact checkers. It also aimed to measure the impact of post-truth spaces through an influence metric that gauges the extent of their interpenetration with more mainstream and central media spaces (where the constitution of the mainstream is also of interest).

The project team included Sofia Bonfanti, Liliana Bounegru, Fabio Daniele, Michaela Dubóczi, Kamila Koronska, Elena Negrea-Busuioc, Richard Rogers, Giulia Tucci and Ahmad Zareie.

The project description can be found here. 

The project “Fostering a Healthy Society through Science and Communication: An Innovative and Integrative Platform for Scientific and Media Education in Schools” aims to enhance media education by familiarizing students and teachers in Romanian schools with science communication and science journalism, thereby contributing to the development of a healthy society. It seeks to stimulate students’ interest in STEM fields and research through an innovative, integrated approach that addresses the current gaps in media and scientific literacy in Romania. The project combines scientific education, science communication, and media and digital literacy activities to transform how science and research are perceived and understood by both students and educators.

Led by the Institute of Sociology of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, the project consortium includes SNSPA, represented by Dr. Elena Negrea-Busuioc. 

The project proposal was submitted to the 2024 "Știința în școli" (SS-SC) competition, funded by UEFISCDI (Romanian Research Funding Council), with results expected in May 2025.