Show & Tell | 25. April 2025

Social Media Data: Show & Tell – Research on Right-Wing Extremism and Democracy (2)

The Working Group on Social Media Data in Research Practice, an initiative of NFDI4Culture in collaboration with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD and Text+ within the framework of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), has been hosting the lecture and discussion series "Social Media Data in Research Practice: Show & Tell" since early 2022.

This ongoing series, held in 90-minute Zoom sessions, explores tools and methodologies in the field of social media research and highlights best practices from selected projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical capabilities (such as APIs, repositories, metadata standards, and interoperability), the series also addresses the ethical and legal challenges associated with the sustainable, secure, and critical use of these data (e.g., personal and copyright law, code and data literacy, and the FAIR & CARE principles). A central aim is to foster discussion around interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that challenge conventional frameworks and disciplinary toolkits.

In 2025, the series will specifically focus on the use of social media data in research on right-wing extremism and democracy.

The second event in the 2025 series will take place on April 25 at 2:00 PM (CEST) and will feature contributions from Jasmin Riedl (Universität der Bundeswehr München), Isabel Bezzaoui, and Ina Ni (FZI Research Center for Information Technology).

Jasmin Riedl will present insights into the SPARTA (Social Media Analysis for Everyone) research project, which has been developing no-code approaches for the live monitoring of social media since 2021. She reports on analysis methods and current use cases and how the project enables data access for external researchers.

Isabel Bezzaoui and Ina Ni from the FZI Research Center for Information Technology will present ongoing projects conducted at the House of Participation, illustrating how social media is used in digital democracy research. In the project SOSEC, public sentiment is regularly collected and analyzed. Their talk will outline their approach of combining social media data with panel survey data to capture shifts in sentiment in response to political, societal, and economic developments.

Alongside these project presentations, the event will center around seven overarching questions regarding the use of social media data and an open discussion with the research community.

Registration: Please register for the event here: https://adwmainz.zoom.us/meeting/register/It_lfxtsRHWnfu7HUy9VUg

Upcoming dates in the “Social Media Data: Show & Tell” series:

June 20, 2025, at 2:00 PM (CEST)

Coordination:

Vincent Fröhlich (vincent.froehlich@staff.uni-marburg.de)

Philippe Genêt (P.Genet@dnb.de)

If you are interested in joining the Social Media Data working group within the NFDI, feel free to subscribe to our mailing list.
Further information about the program, series, and collaborating partners can be found here.