Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OPTED (Observatory for Political Texts in European Democracies - A European Research Infrastructure)
Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-09-30
OPTED addresses a number of challenges that characterise political text analysis research. First, the research field of political text analysis is fragmented and therefore inefficient. This strains resources, but also impairs the quality of scientific work in terms of reproducibility and validity. Second, the research field is time and context-sensitive and language differs between usage areas and over time. Also, the European political space is multilingual and observing this space requires multilingual, non-discriminatory tools. Third, the area of text analysis has been criticised for a lack of reliability, validity, or reproducibility of research. Hence, there is a strong need towards a standardisation of processes and routines. Fourth, researchers working with political texts are touching on ethical and legal boundaries, some of which have not even been well-defined yet.
An institutionalization of the field of political text analysis through a common European infrastructure will yield a more impactful, sustainable, innovative, democratic, non-discriminatory research landscape, putting the European Research Area at the forefront of global developments in this field.
Based on a range of approaches from the project partners, the OPTED Design Study project has provided a comprehensive Conceptual Design Report which serves as a blueprint for building an operational OPTED infrastructure. Services offered through a prototype of the OPTED online platform among others include novel ways to store and retrieve data resources, a curated collection of tools and a mapping of the literature, as well as training materials. The CDR emphasizes the strong need for academic community engagement for further developing the infrastructure in line with community needs.
For the different types of political texts, data inventories and resources have been produced and are now openly accessible. These cover European news media sources and access options to their texts, legislative text corpora across European member states and text data from political organisations, among others. A mapping of the research landscape highlights the need for a truly continental platform that encompasses data from all European nations and encourages researchers to think across borders. OPTED has made accessible and extended previous work on text storage infrastructures for an open science approach, as well as open tools for text annotations. Further, it has produced the first steps towards an infrastructure that will interlink different types of text data. Lastly, OPTED has produced the prototype of the research infrastructure platform. It unites much of the information and services that OPTED sees relevant to offer. Regarding ethical and legal issues, OPTED has produced a comprehensive and publicly available report on the challenges in the field of political text analysis.
All in all, the Design Study phase of OPTED during the project period has made important progress and provided a range of highly relevant blueprints and prototypes that are a comprehensive basis for further developing the OPTED research infrastructure into a Preparatory and Operational phase. The current work has been widely disseminated into the academic community by means of a community survey, publications, conference presentations, sponsoring of academic workshops and events and through social media activities. Thereby, OPTED has created a recognized brand name among its academic user community. It has furthermore begun to establish the OPTED work in relevant stakeholder communities, for instance among research units in national parliaments, political party archives, data journalists and NGOs.
The conceptual design outlines the contours of an OPTED infrastructure that will push the boundaries of research excellence in various fields of political text analysis, generate a globally visible and excellent research community and democratize research on political texts based on FAIR principles. OPTED will establish itself as a major resource for journalists and opinion makers, for students and interested academics, and for policymakers to turn to for systematic information about the state and dynamics of European democracies as evident by political texts. It will become the major hub for political text analysis in Europe and beyond. The resources, standards, and services that are implemented through OPTED are the building blocks for the development of a computational political science of text that is open, transparent, multilingual, flexible, problem focused, gender-aware, text-aware, context-aware and integrated.