Political Meme Annotation for AI Benchmarking
Overview
Did you ever wondered how memes shape political narratives online? We are seeking 3 research assistants to join the project “A Benchmark for Structured Understanding of Social Identities and Narrative Roles in Political Memes”. You will be working with an existing team of three researchers (two professors and a PhD) to help us develop a computational benchmark that improves the modelling of narrative elements in political memes, enhancing our understanding of this communication phenomenon. Specifically, you will be responsible for annotating a provided dataset with a set of predefined labels. Want to know more? Our framework is available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6432282
Details
- 10 h/week (0.25FTE)
- 2 Months (15-05-2026 to 15-07-2026)
- Political Communication and Computational Methods group
Tasks
- Annotate the social/political identities that are represented in memes and their viewpoint.
- Annotate the narrative role assigned to those identities (such as hero, villain, victim, or others).
- Annotate other relevant aspects of the meme, such as template structure or contextual cues.
Requirements
- Master or Bachelor student in the social sciences or humanities.
- Interest in internet culture (in particular, social media and internet memes).
- Annotation experience is a bonus but not required.
What we offer
- A paid position
- Collaboration within a cutting-edge research project, side by side with three staff members
- Opportunity to apply and enhance relevant knowledge around social media communication
- Opportunity to contribute to a societally important topic of narrative understanding in political memes
To apply, please send:
- Your up-to-date CV
- Your list of courses and grades
- A short (2-3 sentence) motivation to work on this project and any relevant prior experience with multimodal content analysis and social media.
via email to a.g.bollicimoreno@vu.nl, wouter.van.atteveldt@vu.nl and f.ilievski@vu.nl by April 15th.
Looking forward to your applications,
