Exploration of
Political
Information
Networks

How does digitalization influence and shape political decision-making? How does information provision work in times of social networks, citizen journalism and new forms of political activism? Do traditional forms of media still play a part? And is the digitalization of the public sphere a threat to democracy? The manifestations of digital communication are complex and often leave us perplexed. EPINetz tries to propose new approaches to find answers to those questions. Our team members develop and test innovative and interdisciplinary methods in order to examine political informational networks. Those are processed using political science based on networks and discourses. The results can then be explored on our interactive platform. We pursue questions about the fragmentation of the digital public sphere, political activism in social media, and the dynamics of political debates online. Our answers should not only be accessible to an academic audience, but also to educational institutions and an interested public. In addition to researchers, citizens and journalists, high school teachers in particular are invited to contact us and use our interactive platform in class. In doing so, the EPINetz Project wants to strengthen media and information literacy, support digital political education and provide an overview in times of digital change.

Platform

EPINetz is designed to provide structured overviews of ongoing political issues and debates. For this purpose, data is collected almost in real time from various sources on the internet. These are primarily news articles from relevant news portals, postings from social media relating to (politically relevant) individuals or organizations and printed materials from the German parliament. These data streams are integrated into a model to which various methods are applied in order to analyze and explore the data. The results obtained through automated analyses are evaluated through an ongoing exchange with experts and users.

Team and Project Partners

EPINetz consists of an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Universities of Heidelberg and Hildesheim. While the research group at the Heidelberg University is primarily composed of computer scientists, the research group at the University of Hildesheim mainly includes social and political scientists. This allows us to combine theoretical approaches and research methods from political science, policy and discourse research with innovative techniques of collecting and analyzing large amounts of digital communication data. In doing so we apply the latest methods from the fields of Data Science and Computational Social Science to answer our research questions. Our project partners help us to continuously evaluate our methods and engage in the exchange with new users.

Publications

Talks