Communication and Information Studies

Communication is everywhere. Think of commercials, Facebook and TV. Professionals carefully plan what type of information people come across. Like to learn more? Then this programme is for you.

N.B. This programme is partly taught in Dutch, but can also be followed entirely in English. International students are welcome to apply.The programme Communication Studies is one of the programmes of the Master's programme Communication and Information Studies.You will learn to analyze organizational, media, computer, persuasive and health communication. During the master, a lot of attention is paid to problem solving, analytical and research skills. In addition, it is a strongly interdisciplinary programme: you not only study communication science, but also language skills and information science. Within this programme you can specialize in health communication.An internship can be part of your programme.

Are you interested in the technology behind smartphones, computers and the internet? Would you also like to know more about the communication elements of those media? Then this programme is for you.

Organizations communicate with their customers through a variety of digital and computer supported channels, like the homepage, social media, apps and email. In the track Computer-mediated Communication, you will study the specific characteristics and possibilities of all these channels. You will also learn about the relevant technologies and products. In addition, you will look at the messages that are being sent via the computer. In this context, you will study the user friendliness of websites and interfaces, as well as the ways in which people communicate through the computer.

Three types of interaction are central to this programme: between people and computers, between people and organizations via the computer and between people amongst themselves. The aim of the programme is to familiarize you with the theories and methods to evaluate these interactions.

Depending on the courses you choose, you will either specialize in technology or in communication. The programme will always keep in touch with the latest developments in the field of information technology.All courses are taught in English. If you need to follow a pre-master, a few courses are taught in Dutch.

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.

Are you interested in the way in which people acquire and develop verbal communication skills? Then this is just the programme for you.

This programme is part of the Master's degree in Communication and Information Studies.

Central to this programme are verbal communication behaviour and the way in which people learn to develop this behaviour. The themes that are important in this context vary: from the development of interactive skills with children to the writing skills of professionals. Changes in society (like the emergence of new media of communication) and their influence on developments in language behaviour are some of the topics you will explore.

With this programme, you choose a theme with a certain social urgency. Our society is making high demands on our communication skills. This has led to a great need for education and training in this area, based on scientific research. This programme trains you to become an expert in the field of communication and education.N.B. The courses in this programme are mainly taught in Dutch, this is not an international MA-programme.

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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.