Ahrabhi Kathirgamalingam

Hi. I am a postdoctoral research associate at GESIS (Germany) in the Computational Social Science (CSS) department and the team Transparent Social Analytics. In my current role, I support the Methods Hub, an open community platform that brings together tools, tutorials and other resources for computational social science methods. Further, I am an external lecturer at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf.

Before, I was a research associate at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (Germany) in the research groups ‘Transformation of Digital Democratic Discourses’ and ‘Research Data and Methods’. As a PhD student at the ‘Computational Communication Science Lab’ at the University of Vienna, I investigated the chances and challenges of automating racism detection in textual data.

My research interests include political phenomena such as polarization, racism, and migration in mediated discourses, as well as methodological questions relating to social bias and Computational Social Science.

upcoming.

31.08.-04.09.2026 - Course coordinator & lecturer / Introduction to Computational Social Science in R / Python / Fall Seminar in Computational Social Science / GESIS, Online

23.09.2026 - Lecture / Ethics: Diversity in Academia / CARE 2026 Bochum, Germany

recent.

06.07.2026 - Guest lecture / Contested constructs and how to find them (in textual data) / Department of Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

22.06.2026 - Keynote lecture / Social Bias in Computational Social Science / SICSS Summer Institute for Computational Social Science, Melbourne, Australia

03.02.2026 - Workshop / Biased by Design? Unpacking Social Bias in CSS / DMRC Summer School 2026 at Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

10.10.2025 - Moderation / Academic Freedom: Foundations for the Future / with Ina Brandes (Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia) , Manfred Bayer (TU Dortmund, Germany), Katrin Weller (Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany | GESIS, Germany) & Tim Majchrzak (CAIS, Germany) / Creating Spaces for Digital Futures at Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Bochum, Germany

latest publications.

You can find my publications on my Google Scholar profile.

Kathirgamalingam, A., Kulichkina, A., Bernhard-Harrer, J., & Hase, V. (2025). Reflecting on Social Bias: Challenges and Opportunities for Computational Social Science. [Preprint] https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/xr45y_v2

Kathirgamalingam, A., Lind, F., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2025). Measuring racism and related concepts using computational text-as-data approaches: a systematic literature review. Annals of International Communication Association, wlaf013, https://doi.org/10.1093/anncom/wlaf013

Lind, F., Song, H., Boomgaarden, H. G., Kathirgamalingam, A., Song, H., Syed Ali, K., & Vliegenthart, R. (2025). Research Practices in Comparative Communication Research: Visibility, Topical and Geographical Disparities, and their Longitudinal Patterns. International Journal of Communication, 19(26), 1103-1128. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/23510

Kathirgamalingam, A., Lind, F., Bernhard-Harrer, J., & Boomgaarden, H. G. (2024). Agree to Disagree? Human and LLM coder bias for constructs of marginalization. [Preprint] https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/agpyr