Philosophy & Emerging Media Studies

Daniel Munro

Assistant Professor, Philosophy

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Potential for UROP Funding

Overview

Led by Professor Daniel Munro (Philosophy) and Ayse Lokmanoglu (Emerging Media Studies), this project examines how religion is discussed, represented, and reasoned about on social media, and how large language models interpret and generate content related to religious belief and practice. We are building a manually coded dataset of social media content that will be used both for original discourse analysis and to train and evaluate LLMs on conversations about religion. This study also supports the development of a research pipeline connecting human content coding to LLM-based analysis.

Your role as a research assistant:
-Work closely with the research team studying religion, AI, and online discourse.
-Receive training in content coding, codebook design, and basic LLM concepts (prompt engineering, model evaluation).
-Manually code social media posts/comments using a structured codebook.
-Help build and maintain a data pipeline (Python) connecting coded data to LLM training/evaluation workflows.
-Maintain coding logs and participate in reliability checks.
-Attend weekly or biweekly check-in meetings.
-Contribute feedback and ideas to the design of the coding pipeline as it evolves.

Position details:
-Part-time: up to 5 hours per week.
-Fall Semester: up to $750 in UROP funding.
-Flexible schedule.
-Potential for continued involvement in research papers, posters, or conference submissions.

What we are looking for:
-Basic proficiency in Python is required.
-Experience with large language models (LLMs), including prompt engineering or using LLM-based tools, is a plus.
-Strong attention to detail and consistency in coding work.
-Interest in religious studies, AI/NLP, digital media, or social science research.
-Ability to work independently and meet weekly goals.

To apply: Please email Professors Munro and Lokmanoglu your resume and a short paragraph on why you are interested in the project (send materials to both dmunro@bu.edu and alokman@bu.edu). The UROP application deadline is September 11, and we will Zoom with interested students before September 1st.