- Design: Stefan Adamick
- Design: Stefan Adamick
- Design: Stefan Adamick
- Design: Stefan Adamick
- Design: Stefan Adamick
Current Events
ZiF Workshop
Research Group Workshop
First Workshop of the Research Group "Multimodal Rhetoric in Online Media Communications"
Kay O'Halloran (Liverpool, GBR), John Bateman (Bremen, GER), Mehul Bhatt (Örebro, SWE)
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New Series in the ZiF's Blog
How will/should the world change? The corona crisis as an interdisciplinary challenge
International Contributions
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Coronavirus – How is Bielefeld University dealing with it?
ZiF – 50 Years
The ZiF's Blog ZiF's Anniversary Photos 50 Years / 50 Objects Milestones
What is the ZiF?
The ZiF is Bielefeld University's Institute for Advanced Study and fosters outstanding and innovative interdisciplinary research projects. The ZiF is an independent thematically open research institution and is open to scholars from all disciplines and all countries.
From the Research and Cooperation Groups
Multimodal Rhetoric in Online Media Communications
2020The Research Group will investigate how the proliferation of media channels enables political sub-communities to manage and control the creation and dissemination of alternative rhetorical discourses, including advertisements that are personalized according to user profiles and false news stories which have been found to spread faster and more widely than true news stories in platforms such as Twitter. Given that these discourses are increasingly supplanting traditional consensus-based media frameworks, it is essential to understand the mechanisms through which these discourses operate. This includes the prime sites identified as carriers of these discourses and the multimodal strategies (linguistic, visual, filmic) used for target audiences and the resultant effects. In particular, we will establish the mechanisms of such rhetorical formations with respect to their relationship with mainstream news and the deployment of social media for their amplification and transportation.
Cognitive Behavior of Humans, Animals, and Machines: Situation Model Perspectives
2019/2020Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience have given us new insights about likely core components of cognitive behavior that exhibits the striking flexibility and context-sensitivity that we see in humans and many animal species. At the same time, progress in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, particularly through deep learning and its connection with other machine learning approaches, along with the availability of sophisticated robots, scenarios and datasets, have opened up new routes for synthesizing intelligent functions. These advances have created a strong basis for a converging and cross-disciplinary challenge: to understand how the emerging functional modules need to be connected in order to enable flexible context-sensitive behavior for both natural cognitive agents as well as for robots to live up to what we would expect from truly intelligent systems.
Statistical Models for Psychological and Linguistic Data
2019/2021The goal of the cooperation group is to investigate and further develop a series of statistical methods that are now available for (a) the analysis of experimental and psychometric data from psychology and psycholinguistics, (b) the modeling of linguistic distributional data, and, possibly going beyond these domains, (c) the analyses of genome-wide associations. The methods in focus are (generalized) linear mixed models [(G)LMMs], generalized additive (mixed) models [GA(M)Ms], and multivariate (generalized) mixed models [MV(G)MMs]. These statistical methods deal with inferential statistical problems that arise from dependencies between, for example, measures on the same subjects or the same items in psycholinguistic experiments or, again as an example beyond the core domains, the same nucleotides in the genome (i.e., within-unit correlations).
Governance, Incentives, and the Quality of Knowledge
2019/2021The cooperation group explores the interaction between economic incentives, institutional features, and epistemic aspirations of science. It brings together economics, sociology, and philosophy of science and seeks to investigate, in particular, the interrelatedness between the social conditions under which science operates and the nature and content of the knowledge produced. Major topical areas concern the incentives operative in the scientific community and their impact on the research process, the influence of social and economic demands, as imposed on research by society, on the research outcomes, and strategies for producing practically fruitful, innovative outcomes. The cooperation group traces the interrelation between the social framework, for one, and the cognitive content of the knowledge gained and the procedures of confirmation invoked, for another.
Breaking Confines: Interdisciplinary Model-Building for a Complex World (BreaCon)
2018/2020Model-building is a methodological centerpiece for addressing the challenges of a complex world. The Breaking Confines (BreaCon) cooperation group is intended to deal with modeling practices by interdisciplinary reflection and exchange. Its participants come from physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, the social sciences, history, and philosophy. They join forces in combining model-building as a central epistemic activity with studies on and analysis of model-building. The envisaged cooperative research process is essentially interdisciplinary in that the migration of models across disciplinary boundaries is pursued.
