Social media and the digitization of news and discussion fora are having far-reaching effects on the way individuals and communities communicate, organize, and express themselves. Can the information circulating on these platforms be tapped to better understand and analyze the enormous problems facing our contemporary society? Could this help us to better monitor the growing number of social crises due to cultural differences and diverging world-views? Would this facilitate early detection and perhaps even ways to resolve conflicts before they lead to violence? The ODYCCEUS project answers all these questions affirmatively. It will develop the conceptual foundations, methodologies, and tools to translate this bold vision into reality and demonstrate its power in a number of case studies.
ODYCCEUS stands for Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces. The project seeks conceptual breakthroughs in Global Systems Science, including a fine-grained representation of cultural conflicts based on conceptual spaces and sophisticated text analysis, extensions of game theory to handle games with both divergent interests and divergent mindsets, and new models of alignment and polarization dynamics. The project will also develop an open modular platform, called PENELOPE, that integrates tools for the complete pipeline, from data scraped from social media and digital sources, to visualization of the analyses and models developed by the project.
On top of the PENELOPE platform, the project will build innovative participatory tools, OPINION OBSERVATORIES and the OPINION FACILITATOR, which allow citizens to monitor, visualize and influence the dynamics of conflict situations that involve heterogeneous cultural biases and non-transparent entanglements of multilateral interests. The OPINION OBSERVATORIES will be designed to take a global view on different ongoing debates. Based on one of the projects OPINION OBSERVATORIES, the climate change opinion observatory, we made a further step in building an OPINION FACILITATOR: a proof-of-concept reading instrument for online news media that enhances the reading experience by automatically interlinking news articles on the level of semantic frames and thus allows to see different perspectives on one issue.
The OPINION OBSERVATORIES and FACILITATOR are intended for a very wide range of audiences - from social scientists over data journalists to the general public. They were released as web applications that use the PENELOPE infrastructure to perform the data gathering, analysis and modelling.
