Aditi Dutta
College: College of Social Sciences and International Studies
Discipline: Politics
Department: Politics
Research Centre/Unit: Q-Step Centre
I am a PhD candidate at the College of Social Science and International Studies of the University of Exeter, on Global Excellence Studentship.
Since my Bachelor's, I had developed an interest in Data Science and its diversity in many fields. While pursuing Masters in the same, I came across NLP. The idea of extracting information from text-based data seemed very unique and demanding at the same time. While we all know about the impacts (both positive and negative) of social media in our life, what intrigued me were the differences in perception of certain comments/posts there, alongside the existing hate speeches and free use of several prejudices (including misogyny) because of the lack of legal boundaries online.
While observing various elections worldwide, it came to my notice that many of the times some genders, especially women, would be facing a lot more discriminatory remarks as compared to their male colleagues, because of their gender and other personal identities.
It was then that I thought of using my background alongside social science (a new area for me, an interesting and important one nonetheless) to learn about the dynamics of online social media platforms.
For my research, I will be looking into the dynamics of online misogyny, with Twitter as my primary platform of interest.
