Computational Social Science advances in research on democratic actors and processes

Keywords: Computational social sciences, Internet, communication, social media, bots, fake news, e-campaigning, terrorism

Description:

The ongoing digital revolution strongly affects various areas of society. It also affects politics, its structures and institutions as well as its actors and processes. The data that is produced by the latter is becoming increasingly important for social sciences, at least in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, this data has a very large potential for replacing – or at least for complementing – traditional forms of data gathered through mass surveys and other forms of observation. Instead of providing information on reported perceptions, unstructured, large-scale and expressed preference data that is collected via digital sensors, social media, smartphones and other devices become a powerful source for empirically oriented social scientists. On the other hand, the data production, quality, security and consumption itself becomes the object of social scientific investigation. How do social media, bots and fake news affect the information environment of electoral campaigns? How do governments, political parties, civil society organizations and even terrorist groups communicate and campaign in the digital world? And how do these changes affect democracy more generally?

The fast growing field of Computational Social Sciences provides researchers with novel methodological techniques and analytical tools for navigating big data in politics. Participants in this workshop will learn to master the main methods to extract and analyze social media data for the analysis of politics. Also, applications of these methods to the analysis of e-campaigning of political parties and candidates as well as in connection to other pressing issues in politics, such as Islamic terrorism, will be at the center of this workshop.

Target group: Doctoral students, advanced Master students and postdoctoral researchers who work either on media and communication, political parties and election campaigns, big data and terrorism. The workshop is also of interest to practitioners in these fields.