Resume
My research
I received my PhD in Digital Humanities from the School of Advanced Study, University of London, funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN. I hold a BA in Journalism and an MA in Communication, both from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil. I have been employed as an early-stage researcher (2019 - 2023) at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, where I joined the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project CLEOPATRA. I’ve also been a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany (2018 and 2023). During my PhD, I worked as a visiting researcher at the UK Web Archive (British Library).
Research interests
My current research focuses on data-driven approaches to the study of news media content. I work with both digitised and born-digital news stories, exploring ways to extract meaningful information from large datasets. In particular, I've been working on digital curation of digitised newspapers archives, media events, and computationally-driven discourse analysis.
My main research interests lie in the fields of digital humanities methods, multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), data visualisation, media studies, Olympic studies, urban studies and digital activism.
Case-study
Olympic cities: mega-events and news media discourses
By employing computational methods to analyse news content, I seek to understand how media narratives of the Olympic Games are produced and reproduced. I've previously worked on the concept of Olympic legacy as narrated by the British and Brazilian news media regarding the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Games. Now, I am investigating the relationship between mega-events and cities as narrated in digitised historical newspapers.
Other activities
Alongside my main activities as a researcher, I sporadically write news stories. My main interests as a journalist are history and the arts. I have also been engaged in translation and revisions (Portuguese-English & English-Portuguese). I have translated lessons for the Programming Historian and revised translations of museum labels for the Ricardo Brennand Institute (Recife, Brazil).
Publications [selected]
Journal Papers
NetzDG on Twitter: A Social Network Analysis of Stakeholders in Public Discourse About Platform Regulation in Germany (paper)
Jens Pohlmann, Caio Mello, Karin León Henneberg, Patrick Zerrer. Policy & Internet, 2025.
Combining sentiment analysis classifiers to explore multilingual news articles covering London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics (paper)
Caio Mello, Gullal S. Cheema, Gaurish Thakkar. International Journal of Digital Humanities, 2022.
Political and Economic Patterns in COVID-19 News: From Lockdown to Vaccination (paper)
Abdul Sittar, Daniela Major, Caio Mello, Dunja Mladenić, Marko Grobelnik. IEEE Access, 2022.
Facebook Event as a platform to promote engagement in social movements: Theory of performativity applied to social networks (paper)
Caio Mello, Carolina Figueiredo. Culturas Midiaticas, 2020.
Book chapters
Challenging the pipeline structure: a reflection on the organisational flow of interdisciplinary projects (book chapter)
Caio Mello. Reframing Failure in Digital Scholarship. University of London Press: Digital Humanities series, 2025.
Data Scarcity and Methodological Limitations in Multilingual Analysis of News Articles Published in Brazil (book chapter)
Caio Mello. Multilingual Digital Humanities. Routledge series Digital Research in the Arts & Humanities, 2023.
Performativity and Conflicts between the occupation of real and virtual spaces: analyzing the Facebook Events platform (book chapter)
Caio Mello, Carolina Figueiredo. Compós 2018: Movement, Space and Alterity. UFBA, 2018
Conference papers
Linked Resources in Debates About the German Network Enforcement Act on Twitter (conference paper)
Jens Pohlmann, Caio Mello & Karin León Henneberg. Vol. 12 No. 1 (2025): Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Social Media (ECSM), 2025.
OEKG: The Open Event Knowledge Graph (conference paper)
Simon Gottschalk, Endri Kacupaj, Sara Abdollahi, Diego Alves, Gabriel Amaral, Elisavet Koutsiana, Tin Kuculo, Daniela Major, Caio Mello, Gullal S. Cheema, Abdul Sittar, Swati, Golsa Tahmasebzadeh, Gaurish Thakkar. 2nd International Workshop on Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics, 2021.
Project reports
Curated politics: A study of Black Lives Matter protests on TikTok using the digital snowball method (Summer School report)
Shuaishuai Wang, Jeroen de Vos, Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, Valeria Donato, Yan Asadchy, Caio Mello et al. Digital Methods Summer School Amsterdam, 2020.
Political Performativity in the Use of Facebook Events by Social Movements (project report)
Caio Mello. Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) fellowship report, 2019.
Teaching
Thinking with Machines - Humanities Research in the Digital Age (Seminar, BA in History)
Faculty of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences, University of Luxembourg (2025) - with Prof. Marten Düring
Concepts of Digital Humanities (Workshop)
School of Advanced Study, University of London (2021 - 2024) - with Dr. Christopher Ohge.
Born-Digital Research in the Humanities (Online course)
School of Advanced Study, University of London (2024)
Introduction to Sentiment Analysis: Potentials and limitations (Workshop) | materials
Center for Advanced Internet Studies (July 2023)
Psychology of Communication (Seminar, BA in Media Studies)
Departamento de Comunicação, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (2016)