Oleksandra Romaniuk is an Elise Richter Senior Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Vienna and Principal Investigator of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)-funded project Love on Screen: A Digital Humanities Analysis of Mate Selection Criteria. She received her PhD in Applied Linguistics in 2015, later nostrified by the University of Vienna (2024). Her research investigates how contemporary media environments shape perception, evaluation, and norm formation in interpersonal contexts. Working at the intersection of Digital Humanities, Media Studies, and Cognitive Approaches to Communication, she develops and applies multimethod designs that integrate multimodal discourse analysis, eye-tracking, sentiment analysis, and audience research.
A central focus of her work is the relationship between visual attention, mediated social scripts, and the limits of introspective access to media influence. Her publications address discourse in global media formats and the implications of algorithmic media environments for social learning and media literacy. Her current work advances a multilevel model of Mediated Multimodal Cognitive Environments (MMCE), linking large-scale media patterning with pre-reflective processing and normative internalization across cultural contexts.

Project: Love on Screen: A Digital Humanities Analysis of Mate Selection Criteria
The project investigates how contemporary romantic media operate as mediated multimodal cognitive environments (MMCE) that shape attention, interpretation, and normative expectations through sustained exposure. Rather than treating media influence as a linear or persuasive effect, the project examines how patterned multimodal cues—visual, embodied, verbal, narrative, and algorithmic—calibrate perceptual priorities prior to conscious reflection.

Methodologically, the project integrates Digital Humanities approaches with cognitive and behavioral methods. It combines large-scale multimodal discourse analysis and social media analytics with experimental eye-tracking and media exposure studies to examine three interconnected layers of media influence: pre-reflective attentional processing, interpretive articulation, and normative internalization.

Focusing on globally circulating romantic formats (including streaming series, reality dating shows, short-form relationship content, influencer-mediated narratives, and platform-native dating interfaces), the project advances a multilevel model of MMCE that links environmental media structures with audience uptake and social learning across cultural contexts. The project contributes to Critical Digital Humanities by demonstrating how computational, experimental, and interpretive methods can be analytically aligned to study media influence as an environmentally distributed process rather than a discrete causal effect.