University Lecturer, LIAS

Areas of Interest

Network analysis, visual analysis, visualization, interface analysis, social media, hyperlinks, digital epistemology

Current projects

Florian Schneider’s digital humanities research focuses primarily on digital politics, specifically the question of how political discourses and knowledge are affected by algorithms and interfaces in digitally networked environments. Schneider’s work takes such ‘third wave’ digital humanities concerns and applies them to contemporary politics and international relations in the East Asian region. His most recent project examines what happens to nationalism when it goes online, using the case of Sino-Japanese history on China’s web. The project combines quantitative and qualitative methods, ranging from discourse analysis to hyperlink network analysis. Focusing on two cases, Digital Nationalism examines the stable, long-term networks surrounding the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, as well as the currently emerging, short-term networks on the ongoing Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute. These case studies demonstrate how Chinese animosities towards Japan are reworked in the service of community building, an activity beneficial both to the state and to private actors, although for different reasons. More generally, Digital Nationalism confronts current theories of political communication and ICT with the realities of the world’s largest national web, which is subject to effective control by China’s state and its ruling party.

Biography

Florian Schneider, PhD, Sheffield University, is Lecturer in the Politics of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is Managing Editor of the academic journal Asiascape: Digital Asia and the author of Visual Political Communication in Popular Chinese Television Series (Leiden & Boston: Brill 2013), which won the 2014 EastAsiaNet book prize. His research interests include questions of governance, political communication, international relations, and digital media in China and East Asia. From 2013 to 2016, he conducted a three-year research project titled ‘Digital Nationalism in China’, funded through a VENI grant by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).

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