SPARTA – Society, Politics and Risk with Twitter Analysis

SPARTA - Society, Politics and Risk with Twitter Analysis - is an interdisciplinary project located at the Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich, Germany. It brings together a team of social and computer scientists to build a state-of-the-art infrastructure that enables large scale analyses of real time and historical Tweets. Moreover, the Twitter lab will become a space for scientists to take advantage of cutting-edge Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches for social media analytics - even with low or no code experience. To test and develop the analysis pipelines, SPARTA focuses on two distinct use cases: first, starting from the German federal election campaign of 2021, the project investigates new forms of digital campaigning, including novel actors and types of (mis-)information involved, as well as their consequences for elections and electoral behavior across political contexts. To that end, it engages both in nowcasting, particularly of voters' sentiments, and retrospective analyses of malicious accounts, networks and interactions. Second, historical Tweets will be used to analyse dynamics within riots and similar forms of violence. The project is interested in understanding the individual-level dynamics and networks behind mobilisation as well as discourses and ideologies surrounding the violence. To begin with, the project studies the Capitol Hill Riots and particularly the various discourses surrounding the violence here, and will subsequently expand analyses to include broader comparisions to other cases.

More information on our website [external Link].

Other project partners: Prof. Dr. Timothy Williams, Prof. Dr. Marko Hofmann, Dr. Anke Fischer-Kattner (UniBw M)

Project duration: 01.01.2021 to 31.12.2024

Funding amount: 3,358,000 €