The research group “Digitalisation and Scientific Value Creation” at the Weizenbaum Institute investigates the influence of digitalization on academic research. Digitalization is understood as a change in the research and publication processes that promises to increase the benefits of research. At the moment, an Open Science infrastructure is being developed and tested at the Weizenbaum Institute. The research group undertakes the scientific monitoring of this process. As the first components of the infrastructure, a repository for publications & research data is being set up, and a Citizen Science portal is being designed and implemented prototypically. While the aim of the repository is to manage research data, the aim of the envisioned Citizen Science portal is to enable scientists as well as non-scientists to participate in research by creating, processing and analyzing research data. The current tried-and-tested approach pursues the idea of drawing the attention of citizens by installing interactive wall-sized displays in public spaces. For the IGF, we prepared a small use case, where Tweets related to the forum are being categorized and rated.
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27.11.2019 2.00-2.45 p.m. Research Group "Democracy and Digitalisation"
Developing a better understanding of the interplay between digitalisation and democratic self-government is the declared aim of the research group ‘Democracy and Digitalisation’. The group’s research focuses on three areas of interest: Political participation, the digital transformation of the democratic public sphere and the reconfiguration of rule in the digital constellation.
At the IGF2019 three researchers from the group - Thorsten Thiel, Sebastian Berg, Niklas Rakowski - will present their work. After a general introduction into different ways of researching digitalisations effects on democracy, we will develop our own approach by developing two strands of research: We will, firstly, outline the form(s) and importance of democratic innovations developed by civic tech actors; and, secondly, discuss the impact of datafication practices on political representation, especially in the context of democratic elections.
28.11.2019 2.00-11.45 p.m. "SDG x ICT Matrices for a Sustainable Digitalisation"
Information and communication technology (ICT) has enhanced citizen participation in disaster relief operations by, for example, promoting awareness of real-time needs in affected areas and ensuring visibility among actors. In particular, in the last decade, there have been intense research activities focusing on non-traditional data sources, such as social media during and after large-scale disasters. This approach, which regards people's communication on social media as a sensor of real-time situations has been widely adopted as the "people as sensor'' approach. I will introduce several "people as sensors'' approaches that have been implemented. Furthermore, to improve recovery efforts after a large-scale disaster, detecting communities’ real-time recovery situations is needed because existing socio-economic recovery indicators, such as observing changes in population and production, and conducting questionnaire surveys, are not available in a real-time way. Thus, using social media data has the possibility of filling the gap by its timeliness, volume, and diversity. Motivated by this possibility, this study gives multiple evidence to support the appropriateness of using social media data for detecting socio-economic recovery activities.
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