📜 We've got a new article out 📜

*Angst M, Müller NN, Walker V. Automated extraction of discourse networks from large volumes of media data* (open access)

https://doi.org/10.1017/nws.2025.4

As part of our sustainability.discourses project, we developed an automated method to gather and track discourse networks around urban sustainable mobility, based on media data.

The article describes the approach in detail and reports an evaluation of the internal validity (do we measure what we ourselves think we measure) of the pipeline.

tl;dnr: Automating discourse network data gathering can work well to capture broader tendencies. In many cases, it is likely not worth investing in automating data gathering to understand discourse however.

Want to see the daily updated pipeline in action? Check out the web apps and resources here: https://sustainability.discourses.ch/en/

#CompSocSci #policystudies #networkscience #nlp #nlproc

🇪🇺 Want to analyze text from the EU public consultations? EU public consultations are a way in which the EU invites the broader public to publicly comment on upcoming legislation.

📦  I just published a first version of a Python package {eu-consultations} to scrape and extract text from the EU website:
https://github.com/marioangst/eu_consultations

- download consultation data as displayed on the EU's frontend into a validated form
- download associated files (this is the hard part about analysing this data - lots of feedback is in .docx and .pdf files)
- extract text from the files using docling and attach to feedback

You get all data in validated form and possibly stored in huge (sorry for that) JSON files ;).

This package is part of an analysis project on feedback the EU has received via the public consultation process on digital policy we plan to present later this year, but I thought let's make some of the tools we use open source way earlier already.

#python #textanalysis #policyanalysis #CompSocSci

Floriana Gargiulo analyzes scientific publication citation data and finds the citation distributions are getting more skewed and the top papers are becoming more stable, becoming a canon

At #CompSocSci satellite
#CCS2024

Luca Gallo studies a group-level attractiveness model to capture higher-order face-to-face interactions of people in the data

At #CompSocSci satellite
#CCS2024

Chiara Zappalà studies the effect of early career successes and tournament prestige on tennis players' careers

At #CompSocSci satellite
#CCS2024

.@elisa_omodei discusses how to collect data about people's opinions and social interactions in the post-API area, indicating data donation would be a new promising pathway

At #CompSocSci satellite
#CCS2024