Silvia Majo-Vazquez

About

Sílvia Majó-Vázquez is a communication researcher and post-doctoral Research Fellow at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Her research areas include news audience behavior, digital news structure and the role of new and legacy media in the online news domain. In 2013, she joined the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (In3) at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya to work as a granted pre-doctoral researcher. As part of her dissertation, she studied how digital technologies are reconfiguring the news media ecology, borrowing tools from network science and using digital data.

In 2015 and 2016, she was a research fellow at DiMeNet group at Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. Jointly with professor Sandra González-Bailón, DiMeNet’s research leader and other colleagues, she is applying insights from network science to understand how people consume online information during major political events.

She has also collaborated with Democracy, Elections and Citizenship, a research group based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). They have studied attitudes towards protest using Twitter and press data and applying a mixed methods approach, which includes data mining, automatic content processing and sentiment analysis.

As a member of eGovernance: Electronic Administration and Democracy research group at In3, she worked on the publicly funded project Opinionet lead by professor Ana S. Cardenal, her thesis supervisor. Their main goal was to study modes of exposure to political information online using browsing tracking data.

Prior to joining the In3, she was faculty member of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona where she taught classes in journalistic genres for undergraduates. From 2011, for three years, she worked at the Catalan Association of Journalists training senior communication professionals and journalist on digital skills. During that time, she also provided consultancy to private and public organizations on digital communication strategies. From 2005 to 2011 she worked as a communication officer at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Barcelona where she was responsible for the corporation’s communication digital strategy and speechwriter for the chairman.

She holds a PhD in Knowledge and Information Society, a M.Sc. in Political Analysis (UOC, 2013) and a Post Degree in Political Communication (UAB, 2005) and completed her undergraduate studies in Journalism at UAB in 2004. She speaks fluent English, Spanish and Catalan. During her Erasmus at the Political Science Faculty of Københavns Universitet in 2003, she studied Danish too. Her other interests include gender studies and the representation of women in the media and in the past, she has collaborated in several studies on this area funded by national and international NGOs.