Communication and Information Studies

What role does communication play in addressing societal challenges, such as environmental obstacles, the rise of AI-tools, and the spread of misinformation? How can the analysis of conversations between doctors or doctors and patients improve patient care? How can you measure the effectiveness of audiovisual material in strategic communication?.This MA track allows you to either specialise in one field of communication or broaden your understanding of communication studies by choosing a range of courses from our four central themes:

• Education communication in practice* Corporate and organizational communication,* Environmental communicationBy connecting the knowledge and skills taught in this programme to societal themes and issues, you will be able to develop sustainable solutions to complex problems. You learn to communicate complex social and environmental issues and to promote sustainable practices. This programme equips you with communication skills for societal developments with perspectives on language and communication from disciplines such as (critical) discourse analysis, psychology, and sociology.

As part of the course "From Classroom to Career", you will do a placement during your Master’s. The programme helps you find a placement at companies such as Noordhoff Publishers, Berenschot, Mircury and CNV Internationaal. This allows you to gain work experience in, for example, writing popular science articles, researching (prospective) audiences, and producing content for social media.

Do you want to be at the forefront of the digital turn in the humanities? The current information revolution opens up exciting perspectives for research and its applications in society.

This Master's track equips you to look at culture, language, history or philosophy through the lens of digital methods.We are witnessing many exciting new trends in information technology. The vast amount of digital data that is available nowadays opens up new research questions and opportunities for real life applications. This Digital Humanities track offers a systematic way to incorporate information technology in humanities research. It trains students with a humanities background for the growing number of research and other job opportunities that require processing of digital information. It reflects on the underlying theory and the impacts on our culture and society. It offers courses for collecting, analyzing and visualizing humanities data. Finally, you will be skilled to work with professional databases, programming scripts, and statistical tools.Students who graduated successfully from this programme were able to integrate a humanities perspective with computational methods. For instance, the thesis “Tracing Joyce’s notes for Ulysses” (2017) employed automation strategies for the digital representation and for source-tracing of Joyce’s notebooks. Another example is the thesis “Visualizing trade” (2018), in which an analysis of the Baltic trade in the 18th century was done by using visualization applications on the Sound Toll registers. By exploring visualization as a tool, the student was able to implement a Digital Humanities approach to a historical problem not just to identify patterns and analyze them, but also suggesting new interpretations.

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Are you fascinated by artificial intelligence and language technology? In this study you learn how to develop and assess smart applications such as conversational agents, automatic translation systems, and intelligent search engines.As an MSc student of Information Science, you learn how to analyze unstructured data (such as text) automatically, and find out which machine learning techniques can be used to solve problems in information science. You also take part in shared tasks (working with a group on a challenging problem in language technology), and apply methods from artificial intelligence to real-world applications such as machine translation for low-resource languages, the semantic web, hate-speech detection, and smart user interfaces.

The Master's track builds on the knowledge, insights and skills that you have acquired in your Bachelor's degree. You will learn to carry out research independently and improve your programming, analytical and presentation skills.

This track is a specialization of the Master's degree programme in Communication and Information Sciences. All courses are taught in English.