The rise of digital media platforms is changing the public political discourse dramatically. The platforms facilitate communication to an unprecedented extent, which leads to an abundance of continuously generated data that calls for new means to make it comprehensible to human participants. The ODYCCEUS (Opinion DYnamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces project is devoted to the development of theories and methods to deal with this challenge. The project is highly interdisciplinary, combining groups from mathematics, complex systems, and computer science with sociology, media studies, history, and geography. The project seeks conceptual breakthroughs, including a fine-grained representation of cultural conflicts based on conceptual spaces and natural language processing, extensions of game theory to handle games with both divergent interests and divergent mindsets, and new models of alignment and polarization dynamics. In order to make the developed tools available to a larger scientific and non-scientific audience, the project has established an open platform PENELOPE(https://penelope.vub.be/), that provides modules for the complete pipeline starting at data acquisition from social media and digital sources, to visualization of the analyses and models developed by the project.
The ODYCCEUS project will collaborate with HiDALGO in particular on the further development of empirically informed models of opinion dynamics. The project will interchange information on relevant events and where appropriate attend.
Find more information about ODYCCEUS on their website!
