Laura Vodden is a Data Scientist at the Digital Media Research Centre. She has an interdisciplinary academic background with qualifications in archaeology, geological science, and data science. Since joining the DMRC in 2021, she has supported the methodological and software development, and data acquisition for Professor Axel Bruns’s Australian Laureate Fellowship project, Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate. Laura’s research is situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computational methods, content analysis, and gender studies, with a particular focus on the mechanisms through which gender is constructed and ‘policed’ by news media. Her work develops a methodological framework for the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in supporting qualitative research, contributing to ongoing scholarly debates surrounding the integration of AI in the social sciences. This includes critical engagement with questions of methodological rigour, epistemological validity, and the ethical implications of LLM-assisted research.