Isabelle van der Vegt
Bio
I am a PhD student at the UCL Department of Security and Crime Science. I also work as a research assistant on the ERC-funded GRIEVANCE project. The focus of my research is understanding threats of violence by using computational linguistics. I aim to develop solutions to better understand and counter radicalisation, extremism, terrorism, and other forms of grievance-fuelled targeted violence. I am also interested in improving research transparency within and beyond the field of crime science: check out the open science seminar series I co-organise.
News (spring/summer 2019)
- We have conducted interviews with social media companies for our project on human-machine integration for extremist content removal. The report is available here (with Paul Gill, Stuart Macdonald, and Bennett Kleinberg.
- I will present at the POLTEXT conference, on 14-15 September in Tokyo, Japan. The talk will discuss the forthcoming paper: ‘Online influence, offline violence: Linguistic responses to the ‘Unite the Right’ rally (with Maximilian Mozes, Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill).
Brief CV
- 2018-present: PhD candidate, Department of Security & Crime Science, University College London, supervised by Paul Gill & Bennett Kleinberg
- 2015-2017: Research Master’s degree in Psychology, University of Amsterdam
- 2012-2015: Bachelor of Liberal Arts & Sciences (Psychology + Linguistics), University College Utrecht
Recent publications & pre-prints
- van der Vegt, I., Gill, P., Macdonald, S., Kleinberg, B. (2019). Shedding Light on Terrorist and Extremist Content Removal. Global Research Network on Terrorism and Technology. Paper.
- Soldner, F., Ho, J., Makhortykh, M., van der Vegt, I., Mozes, M., Kleinberg, B. (2019). Uphill from here: Sentiment patterns in videos from left- and right-wing YouTube news channels. 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science. Paper.
- Kleinberg, B., van der Vegt, I., Arntz, A., Verschuere, B. (pre-print). Detecting deceptive communication through linguistic concreteness. Paper here.
- Kleinberg, B., Mozes, M., & van der Vegt, I. (2018). Identifying the sentiment styles of YouTube’s vloggers. Proceedings of EMNLP 2018. Click here for the paper, data, and code.
Previous activities
- I was a guest tweeter for Researc/hers code a platform supporting women in computational science, research and tech.
- I spoke at the Terrorism & Social Media conference in Swansea, 25-26 June 2019. The talk focussed on linguistic trajectories of YouTube’s alt-right (with Maximilian Mozes, Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill, paper in preparation).
- I spoke at the Society for Terrorism Research conference in Oslo, 20-21 June 2019. My talk focussed on developing the GRIEVANCE dictionary: understanding terrorist language use (with Bennett Kleinberg, Paul Gill). I also co-presented the paper: Towards Open and Reproducible Terrorism Studies (with Sandy Schumann, Bart Schuurman, & Paul Gill).
- At the 2019 UCL Open Science Day, we spoke about our open science seminar series at the Department of Security and Crime Science. You can find the website for JDI Open here and our slides on ‘Promoting Open (Crime) Science’ here.
- I co-organised a workshop on linguistic temporal trajectory analyis at the European Computational Social Science symposium 2018. You can find more information here.
- Violent mood swings: intra-textual sentiment of lone-actor manifestos. Talk at VOX-POL: Violent extremism, terrorism, and the internet: present and future trends, Amsterdam, Netherlands (August 21, 2018). Slides and data, paper submitted.