The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded IGS and CTIT researchers with one of their Medium Sized Investment grants. The researchers will receive 250,000 Euro for their proposal “Transforming social media contents to political data”.
Social media and politics
Social media (a.o. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) are cheap, easy to use, and increasingly popular – also among politicians. But what is the importance of social media use for the formation of political opinions? The structure, continuity and enormous amount of social media utterances have so far defied a proper assessment of this question.
This project aims at providing a technological and methodological infrastructure for harvesting and transforming social media utterances to data that can be analyzed in conjunction with more traditional types of data, notably survey data. The project is a pilot study that will result in procedures and software that can be upgraded to larger projects.
Combining governance and ICT
For this project, political scientists at the University of Twente will collaborate with information specialists and language technology experts. The project leader is Kees Aarts (IGS, Political science); other partners include Jos van Hillegersberg and Chintan Amrit (CTIT, Information systems & Change Management), Franciska de Jong (CTIT, Language technology) and Adrie Dassen (IGS Datalab).
