Dr. Jens Pohlmann, Associate Researcher at Stanford's Poetic Media Lab and currently Visiting Fellow at ZeMKI in Bremen, and Dr.
Adrien Barbaresi from the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities will give the lecture "The IT-Blog Sphere and Its Discussion of Digital Policy" as part of our lecture series "Leibniz Media Lunch Talks". The lecture will be held in English, the discussion can also be held in German. Please bring your own lunch with you. If you would like to participate, please register by sending an email to
info @ leibniz-hbi.de.
About the Presentation
Following the assumption that IT-blogs represent an avant-garde of technologically and socially interested experts, Jens Pohlmann (Stanford University) and Adrien Barbaresi (BBAW) present a research platform to observe their input on the public discussion of matters situated at the intersection of technology and society.
Text and metadata from hundreds of German and U.S. IT-blogs have recently been made available by the
Center for Digital Lexicography of German at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) (IT-Blog-Korpus, 1996–2019,
https://www.dwds.de/d/k-web#it_blogs). Based on this data and using the analysis tools provided, we can now study the discussion regarding digital policy in this subfield of the digital public sphere and compare it with discourse in traditional media settings (newspaper corpora) and the policy discussion (corpus of parliamentary debates and other policy corpora). Our goal is to identify the most influential stakeholders in the respective subfield, their communication strategies, and the arguments they bring forward. What are the challenges that these players detect with regards to the impact of digital technologies on democracy and to what extent do they differ from those recognized on the other side of the Atlantic?
Our platform is intended to become a research tool for scholars who are working at the crossroads of technology, public policy, society and the Internet. It quickly provides access to the relevant discourse and allows users to query, study, and explore the different corpora and medial registers. Computational research methods such as assisted close reading, distant reading processes, and the analysis of communication and reference networks will allow for in-depth investigations regarding free speech issues, privacy laws, upload filters, AI, or copyright legislation in the digital age.
About Adrien Barbaresi and Jens Pohlmann
Dr. Adrien Barbaresi works at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities/Centre for Digital Lexicography of the German Language, where he coordinates the field of contemporary and web-based corpora. Among other things, he deals with the compilation and indexing of language data. http://adrien.barbaresi.eu/
Dr. Jens Pohlmann is Associate Researcher at Stanford's Poetic Media Lab and currently Visiting Fellow at ZeMKI in Bremen. He works on the historical and cultural causes of the current transatlantic disagreements in Internet policy.
Leibniz Media Lunch Talks
At the Leibniz Media Lunch Talks, researchers present current topics, interim results from their research projects or doctoral theses in a relaxed atmosphere. You are welcome to bring your own lunch and enjoy it during the talk.
