Orsolya Ring

My research focuses on the social, theatre and press history of the second half of the 20th century in Hungary, with particular attention to the official and alternative public spheres of the Kádár era. As a historian-archivist I use the digital humanities toolkit to analyse large archival and press corpora at scales not feasible with traditional methods. As a university lecturer and PhD supervisor I am also engaged in teaching social, theatre and propaganda history alongside the methods of digital history.

Research areas

Historical research with digital methods

Quantitative analysis of archival and press corpora: text mining, topic modelling, named-entity recognition (NER), AI-supported coding. Adaptation of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) framework to Hungarian and Central European sources.

The Hungarian National Theatre and theatre history

Digital analysis of the political and professional discourse on the Hungarian National Theatre between 1957 and 1988 — symbolic and pragmatic argumentative categories, decision-making processes and institutional transformations in a key cultural-political case study.

Social mobility

Internal mobility patterns of 20th-century Hungarian society — education, employment and institutional channels. Cases examined within Rudolf Andorka’s analytical framework: diocesan-supported pupils, female party cadres and the impact of family-support policies on shifts in social position.

Women, work, power

The social and labour-market position of women — and their power positions — in the second half of the 20th century, from the cadre policy of the Rákosi era to the social policy of the Kádár era. Career paths, mobility channels and institutional conditions analysed prosopographically and through text analysis.

The public sphere and press of the Kádár era

Comparative analysis of the official and alternative (samizdat) public spheres of the party-state period. Discourse framing, the temporal evolution of argumentative categories, and the media representation of the political elite.

Central European media and disinformation studies

Machine-learning-supported analysis of press discourses across the V4 region: media bias, disinformation, crisis communication. Methodological permeability between historical and contemporary research.

Affiliations

2018 –
Senior Research Fellow · ELTE Centre for Social Sciences
2021 –
Associate Professor · Faculty of Humanities, ELTE — Institute of Historical Studies

Projects

  • 2026 – Researcher Knowledge Elite and Politics in the Horthy Era — Mobility, Networks, Autonomy NKKP · ELTE Faculty of Social Sciences ElitData Research Group Prosopographic analysis of the interwar knowledge elite using digital methods — recruitment patterns, networks and autonomy of those holding key academic and ministerial positions. Website: ElitData Research Group
  • 2024 – 2026 Researcher MORES — Moral Emotions in Politics Horizon Europe Machine-learning analysis of emotional patterns in political discourse. Website: mores-horizon.eu
  • 2024 – 2027 Researcher PLEDGE — Politics of Grievance and Democratic Governance Horizon Europe Investigating the emotional dynamics of political grievance and its consequences for democratic governance in European public opinion. Website: pledgeproject.eu
  • 2024 – 2026 (Co-)Work-Package Leader PROMPT — Predictive Research On Misinformation & Propagation Trajectories EU CNECT Predictive research on disinformation and analysis of its propagation patterns. Website: disinfo-prompt.eu
  • 2023 – 2025 Principal Investigator (PI) Identifying News Slant in Crisis Communication Using Artificial Intelligence Visegrad Fund Analysis of crisis communication in the Hungarian, Polish, Czech and Slovak press. Outcome: V4 Dashboard — interactive media research visualisation.

Career milestones

  1. 2000 MA in History ELTE Faculty of Humanities
  2. 2000 – 2018 National Archives of Hungary Archivist, then Deputy Head of Department (2014–2016) and Head of Department (2016–2018). Cold-War era sources, the second public sphere, state security records.
  3. 2011 PhD in History (summa cum laude) ELTE Faculty of Humanities · Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography (supervisor: Péter Erdősi)
  4. 2018 – 2025 Senior Research Fellow HUN-REN Centre for Social Sciences (from 2025: ELTE Centre for Social Sciences). Computational analysis of historical and contemporary texts.
  5. 2021 – Associate Professor ELTE Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Historical Studies — digital humanities, qualitative and quantitative data analysis, computational methods.

Publications