Current Research Projects

The code and the resources we share emerge from our substantive research. The focus is on migration and integration policies and democratic pluralist politics in a multi-level settings.

Linking Textual Data

Funding: German Research Foundation / DFG (2020-2025)

Corpora have become an important data type in the social sciences. Methods for analysing text are developing rapidly. A crucial aspect of the huge potential of large-scale corpora for the social sciences are capabilities to link the analysis of text and other data types, such as surveys. Yet the barriers to data linkage are still high. In the project “Linking Textual Data”, we develop tools for linking different data types in order to open up new avenues for research.

This project is a measure within KonsortSWD (Consortium for the Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Sciences), which is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) that is established in Germany. The NFDI attempts to make research data available to the scientific community, guided by the FAIR principles. KonsortSWD is a consortium within the NFDI and expands NFDI services in the social, educational, behavioural and economic sciences.

The Populist Challenge in Parliament

Funding: German Research Foundation / DFG (2018-2021)

The “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) is the first right-wing populist party that has established itself successfully in the party system of post-war Germany and that has made its way into Germany’s parliamens, at the federal and the regional level. Cooperating with Christian Stecker, Marcel Lewandowsky, and Jochen Müller, our DFG-funded project on the populist challenge in parliament will examine how the AfD interacts with established party groups and how the parliamentary arena is changing due to its presence. We will analyse parliamentary speeches, parliamentary initiatives (e.g. parliamentary questions, resolutions, amendments) and behavioural data (e.g. voting behaviour for specific issues). The project builds on the data and the infrastructure offered by the PolMine Project and will generate insights using recent methodological developments by the computational social science and the eHumanities.

Language Resources for Migration and Integration Research (MigTex)

Funding: Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (2018-2019)

The aim of the “MigTex”” project is to identify language resources that are relevant for migration and integration research (i.e. corpora, dictionaries, annotations, training data), to transform these resources into sustainable data formats and to make them accessible for the research community. Methodologically, the project contributes to the fields of eHumanities or Computational Social Science and is carried out in a cooperation between the University of Duisburg-Essen (Interdisciplinary Center for Integration- and Migrations Research / InZentIM) and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. It contributes to the development of DeZIM, the German Centre for Migration and Integration Research.

Earlier Projects

  • In a CLARIN-funded cooperation project with the [Institut für maschinelle Textverarbeitung Stuttgart](http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/), we developed manual "gold standard" annotations of topics in parliamentary debates using an adapted coding scheme from the Comparative Policy Agendas Project.
  • The project "Arenas of Political Interest Intermediation", funded by MERCUR, had a focus on the comparative analysis of the migration and integration policy domain, environmental policy, and social policy, and of the visiblity of interest groups in newspaper reports.
  • In the context of a cooperation with the [Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS)](http://www1.ids-mannheim.de/), we prepared and shared a first version of the parliamentary debates in Germany's regional parliaments. This corpus is part of DeReKo (Deutsches Referenzkorpus).