Profile
Cristian Edel Weiss is a PhD student in Political Science (CDSS) at the Graduate School of Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Mannheim. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Communication and Journalism (Brazil) and a Master's degree in Media, Technology and Society from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (Germany).
In his Master's thesis, Cristian examined how President Jair Bolsonaro's policies and attitudes toward the critical press and transparency procedures affected information requests submitted by journalists under the Freedom of Information (FOI) law in the field of education. The research, grounded in the concepts of social accountability and watchdog journalism, focused on a quantitative analysis of open public data from the Brazilian FOI database, in force since 2012, This was complemented by computational textual analysis using topic modeling and Natural Language Processing techniques to study the textual corpora of information requests submitted by journalists between 2019 and 2020.
Since 2010, Cristian has worked as a journalist for some of the largest media companies in Brazil, covering topics such as Politics, Education, Human Rights, Environment, Science, and Public Policy. In 2019 and 2020, he was trained as a data journalist by the Deutsche Welle Akademie (Germany) and worked at the Deutsche Welle Newsroom in Bonn. Additionally, Cristian was a member of the Comprova Project, a coalition of major Brazilian media outlets dedicated to fact-checking and combating misinformation during the 2018 presidential election and the 2020 pandemic. The team was trained and coordinated by the First Draft Organization, affiliated with the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School, and the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism.
Cristian's research interests include the Right to Information, Human Rights, Press Freedom, Freedom of Information, Social Accountability, Media and Power, Transparency, and International Relations. He is also interested in computational methods for both quantitative and qualitative research.