Our research takes a close look at the key challenges of our time: the communication of and about scientific and political topics in a new, digitally networked (media) environment. One peculiarity of online communication is that there are numerous different actors who can participate in the discussion about a certain topic. They compete for attention and regarding the interpretation of an issue. This fabric of related communication can be described as a network that changes dynamically. The chair pursues this network-oriented research perspective with an interdisciplinary orientation for the analysis of science and political communication (see for example research group “Politische Kommunikation in der Online-Welt”: http://www.fgpk.de/teilprojekte-2/#Teilprojekt7).

A research focus of the chair is the analysis of public discussions about climate change in different arenas (online, mass media, politics) and the construction of climate change skepticism. While doing this, we explore the presence of sceptics in different tenders of communication and search for factors that explain this visibility. Besides, we concentrate on communicative strategies of this countermovement to attack the scientific consensus and to create uncertainty with the aim to prevent political regulations (politicization of science).

Apart from content-related questions, we also focus on methods for automated content analysis such as topic modelling, named entity recognition and document/sentence classification with machine learning.