Project Visual Deliberation

Prof. Dr. Bernd Fröhlich
Dr. rer. nat. Patrick Riehmann
M.Sc. Dora Kiesel

15 Credits Medieninformatik (B.Sc.)
15 Credits Computer Science for Digital Media (M.Sc.)
15 Credits Computer Science and Media (M.Sc.)
15 Credits Human-Computer Interaction (M.Sc.)

Description:

Deliberation describes the process of careful consideration and discussion with the aim of forming an opinion, convincing others of one's own opinion, or making a generally accepted decision. Deliberative quality of discussions encompasses among other aspects to justify expressed opinions, to be respectful to each other and to react on other users' opinions and arguments. Despite the success of many researchers in the digital humanities and social sciences, this process has not been fully understood and investigated yet. Questions still unanswered regard phases or periods during a discussion. When do phases of high deliberation quality occur and when phases of low quality? Which conditions improve or distract the quality of deliberation? Do typical speech patterns exist that can be identified as triggers for changes in deliberation quality? In collaboration with the Institute of Communication Science in Jena and the Chair of Empirical Methods in Communication Science led by Prof. Engelmann, we are going to develop novel visualization and interaction techniques to answer such questions based upon a data set of pre-identified deliberative interactions in user comments on online newspaper articles.

Assignments:

Active participation in the project, intermediate talks, final presentation