Kateryna Kasianenko

I am a PhD researcher and an educator studying digital platforms at Queensland University of Technology, Digital Media Research Centre. I am also affiliated with CSIRO's Data61 unit. 

This quote from Lewis Mumford summarises my professional experience well: 

"... nonlinear interactions almost always make the behavior of the aggregate more complicated than would be predicted by summing or averaging". 

I majored in Japanese language during my undergraduate studies, and I began my career as a translator and a fixer for Japanese television channels in 2013. I was involved in their coverage of the events in Ukraine and other European countries, such as the Revolution of Dignity, russia's annexation of Crimea and its military incursion into Eastern Ukraine, as well as the 2016 refugee crisis. In late 2016, I was granted a scholarship to pursue a Master's degree in Japan. During my studies, I worked as a researcher for the international news desk of Nippon TV, one of Japan's largest television stations.

After witnessing the increased adoption of AI tools that could replace translators and interpreters like myself, I retrained as an engineer and worked for a software company in Australia. I am now bringing together my passions for language, technology, and society in my PhD project. I use computational and qualitative methods to understand how social media enable and constrain global publics' support for Ukraine during russia's full-scale invasion. 

I do so by identifying online community practices - sustained ways of saying and doing things together with others online - through using large language models (LLMs), network analysis, and ethnographic methods. In my PhD project, I study communities of Eurovision fans, the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), and supporters of Ukraine on Japanese Twitter. You can learn more about my research by visiting the links below.