What makes the World Wide Web tick?
Citizens' protests, the rise of the Pirate Party and the role of Facebook and Twitter in the "Arab Spring" show that political communication works differently on the Internet than it does in conventional mass media. However, as yet, little research has been done on how issues spread in the World Wide Web and how opinion making through the Internet works. This has been due to a lack of effective methodical instruments to analyse the representation of the general public on the Internet. It is the aim of a project run by IT business engineers of Münster University to develop these much-needed methodical instruments.
Researchers from the universities of Munich, Potsdam and Stuttgart-Hohenheim are also involved in the project. The Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) is providing €800,000 to promote the project, which is called "Social Media Discourse Analysis", until 2015.
The possibilities of the Internet give rise to both hopes and concerns. Social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, raise questions such as: Do citizens gain more influence on democratic processes, or is the power of opinion making still in the hands of a selected few? How does the social environment influence the quality of political discussions? To be able to answer these questions better in the future, new interdisciplinary methods are to be developed within the project. Therefore, subjects such as Business Informatics, Computer Linguistics and Communication Studies will be involved.
The main aim is to provide automated content analysis in order to evaluate the huge amount of texts that is typical for the Internet. Postings from selected topics will be identified, filed, and later evaluated with regard to form and content. Additionally, the networks between the postings will be collected and analysed in order to reveal how influential individual network nodes are and how they are distributed.
Professor Stefan Stieglitz, who, with his research team, focuses mainly on automated analysis of social media, has been entrusted with the coordination of the project. He believes that the project is of great interest "because in recent years, vast changes in societal discourse have emerged which are becoming more and more evident in both politics and business". Stieglitz is collecting a great amount of data, using software that he himself developed with his team. This data will be the empirical basis for the project and should enable a better understanding of opinion making via Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
Translated by Master's students from Joanna Becker's German English Translation Course, English Department