Erik Borra is assistant professor in Journalism and New Media at the University of Amsterdam. He holds an MSc in artificial intelligence and information retrieval; his PhD research focused on the use of web data and new digital research instruments in the humanities and social sciences.
Since many years Erik has been the technical director of the Digital Methods Initiative, one of Europe’s leading schools for internet studies. In that capacity he developed dozens of tools to gather, analyze and visualize web data. In addition, he participated in several international research projects concerning i.a. internet censorship (opennet.net) and the mapping of controversies in politics and science (mappingcontroversies.net, climaps.eu). Erik also collaborated with Barcelona Media, Yahoo Research, “Pauw en Witteman” and “de Correspondent”, among others. His research now focuses on data (infrastructure) literacy in journalism, the use of web data in journalistic productions, and online journalistic storytelling.
Erik’s courses for the MA program in Journalism mainly focus on digital sources, data journalism, quantitative methods and multimedia narratives. For the MA in New Media and Digital Culture Erik continues to teach the course Research Methods for New Media.
Erik is currently the chairman of the board of studies for the MA's in Media Studies.