Author: Christian Strippel

Call for Contributions: “Data, Archives, & Tool Demos” at the 2024 DGPuK Annual Conference

Christian Strippel

We are excited to announce that Methods Lab lead Christian Strippel organizes a panel on “Data, Archive & Tool Demos” at the Annual Conference of the German Communication Association (DGPuK) on March 13-15, 2024, in Erfurt. The corresponding Call for Contributions can be found here: https://www.dgpuk2024.de/sonderfenster/

Similar to the “Tool Demos” at international conferences, the panel serves as a forum for sharing reusable research data, databases, collections, archives, as well as tools and R packages with a wider academic audience. This initiative builds on the success of the “Research Software for Communication and Media Studies” panel in 2019, but this time aiming to enhance the development, provision, and utilization of research infrastructures and resources in German-speaking communication and media research in general.

Colleagues who wish to present data, archives, or tools at the panel are invited to submit a short abstract (200-300 words), with relevant links or screenshots, to christian.strippel@weizenbaum-institut.de by the submission deadline of November 30, 2023. To be eligible for submission, your tool or resource should not have been previously featured in the research tools panel 2019 or the special issue in Publizistik. It should be openly available for scholarly reuse and not operated for commercial purposes.

For more information and submission guidelines, please visit this page.

Book Launch: Challenges and Perspectives of Hate Speech Research

Christian Strippel

We are thrilled to announce the release of “Challenges and Perspectives of Hate Speech Research,” a collection of 26 texts on contemporary forms of hate speech by scholars from various disciplines and countries. The anthology is co-edited by Methods Lab members Christian Strippel and Martin Emmer, together with research colleagues Sünje Paasch-Colberg and Joachim Trebbe. Divided into three sections, it covers present-day political issues and developments, provides an overview of key concepts, terms, and definitions, and offers numerous methodological perspectives on the topic. Whether you are a fellow academic researcher or a concerned netizen, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the dynamic field of interdisciplinary hate speech research and the future of our evolving digital landscape.

Challenges and Perspectives of Hate Speech Research is open access!

This book is the result of a conference that could not take place. It is a collection of 26 texts that address and discuss the latest developments in international hate speech research from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. This includes case studies from Brazil, Lebanon, Poland, Nigeria, and India, theoretical introductions to the concepts of hate speech, dangerous speech, incivility, toxicity, extreme speech, and dark participation, as well as reflections on methodological challenges such as scraping, annotation, datafication, implicity, explainability, and machine learning. As such, it provides a much-needed forum for cross-national and cross-disciplinary conversations in what is currently a very vibrant field of research.

Software Review: BRAT Rapid Annotation Tool

Christian Strippel

Our Methods Lab group lead and WI research associate, Christian Strippel, has written a software review of the BRAT rapid annotation tool, co-authored by Laura Laugwitz, Sünje Paasch-Colberg, Katharina Esau, and Annett Heft. The review is published in issue 4/2022 of Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft. Read the article here.

In the context of interdisciplinary collaboration, especially with colleagues from computer science, communication and media research has for some time been confronted with a wide range of research software with which it has had little prior experience. In addition to programming lan­guages such as Python or R, these include specific tools for text analysis that represent an alterna­tive to previous variants of computer-assisted content analysis. With the brat rapid annotation tool (BRAT) we present such an alternative in this paper and review it against the background of our experience in using it. BRAT is a web-based open-source text annotation tool that was developed by an international team of computer scientists about ten years ago. The article introduces the tool and its most important features, presents examples for its use in qualitative and quantitative content analyses on the basis of three case studies, and finally evaluates it with regard to potentials and difficulties for the field.