Yangliu Fan, PhD, is a researcher at the “Digitalization and Participation” department of the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. She is also a postdoctoral researcher at the research group “Digital News Dynamics“ at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Germany.  Before coming to Berlin, she earned her PhD in Social Data Science at the Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS) at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

Summer term 2026

28842 Advanced Seminar: Diagnosing structures of division: concepts and measures of political polarization

Summer term 2025

28848 Advanced Seminar: Structures of division: Political polarization in different contexts 

28871 Advanced Seminar: Comparing networked public spheres during election campaigns in different countries 

Winter term 2023/24:

28628 BA PuK Seminar: Networks in Online Political Communication: Theory and Concepts (co-taught with Jakob Ohme)

28629 BA PuK Seminar: Networks in Online Political Communication: Application

Research fields:

• Computational Social Science
• Science Studies
• Media Studies
• Digital Methods

• Ohme, J., Mayer, A. T., Charlton-Czaplicki, T., Gaisbauer, F., Wedel, L., Fan, Y., & Neuberger, C. (2026). D [X] IM-the Dynamic Intermediary Model of communicative transaction on digital platforms in a networked public sphere. Communication Theory, 36(1), 12-23. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaf025

• Wedel, L., Ohme, J., Mayer, A. T., Gaisbauer, F., & Fan, Y. (2026). The platform matters: cross-platform differences in data donation willingness, behavior, and bias. Communication Methods and Measures, 1-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2025.2605946

• Fan, Y., Buehling, K., & Stocker, V. (2025). Beyond Citations: Measuring Idea-level Knowledge Diffusion from Research to Journalism and Policy-making. arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.03378. https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03378

• Fan, Y., Ohme, J., & Neuberger, C. (2025). Digital Turn Without Digital Methods? Mapping the Journey of Journalism Studies. Digital Journalism, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2480106

• Fan, Y., Blok, A., & Lehmann, S. (2024). Understanding the scholars' trajectories across scientific periodicals. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-54693-7

• Fan, Y., Lehmann, S., & Blok, A. (2023). New methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-) organize research using social media data. Quantitative Science Studies, 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00271

• Fan, Y., Lehmann, S., & Blok, A. (2022). Extracting the interdisciplinary specialty structures in social media data-based research: A clustering-based network approach. Journal of Informetrics, 16(3), 101310. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2022.101310