Collaborative Research Projects
Funding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science North Rhine-Westphalia
Principal Investigator: Heiko Beyer (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 10/2022 – 10/2024
Cooperating partner: Lars Rensmann, University of Passau
The study examines the different milieu-specific and situational manifestations of antisemitic attitudes, speech and behavioral preferences. Using new antisemitism scales and survey experiments the study will investigate the specific social and situational contexts, forms and dimensions of antisemitism and shed light on their proliferation in different milieus. The results will then be used to develop recommendations for action via educational programs combating antisemitism.
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Funding Source: Mercator Foundation
Principal Investigator: Frank Marcinkowski, Christopher Starke, Pero Došenović, Birte Keller, Kimon Kieslich (Department of Social Sciences/ Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy)
Duration: 04/2021 – 03/2024
Cooperating partner: CAIS Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum
In recent years, numerous strategy papers on the development of digitization and so-called artificial intelligence (AI) have been published from the European to the state level. What they all have in common is the intention of a stronger orientation toward people and the common good. If politics takes its own claim seriously, it is dependent on the support of an active and enlightened civil society that contributes its needs and ideas to the shaping of digitization policy in a mature and self-determined manner.
Otherwise, the development and implementation of AI technologies will remain the preserve of interested industry, whose primary goal is to maximize profits and increase efficiency. Studies from the U.S. and the U.K. show that the public debate to date has been heavily dominated by industry (Brennen et al. 2018; Fast & Horvitz 2017). These actors argue from their own specific logic. So far, no systematic findings are available for the German discourse. The Meinungsmonitor Künstliche Intelligenz [MeMo:AI] aims to close this gap.
The project is based on the assumption that the realization of a comprehensive claim to shape society requires a politicization of the topic. This means, first of all, that the topic of AI and digitization is recognized as an object of political debate and will formation. Research from other topic areas such as EU politics (e.g., De Wilde, 2011; Schattschneider, 1957) shows that three conditions must be met: (1) the existence of alternative positions in the public debate (polarization); (2) broad media attention that ensures popularization of issues and dissemination of different positions (intensity); and (3) societal attention to an issue and electoral significance (resonance). An apt example of such a development is the recent issue and political career of climate change. To what extent there will be a comparable trajectory for AI, MeMo:KI will assess this by systematically monitoring public and published opinion.
The study uses a combination of different empirical methods. Both time-honored methods of social science research such as media content analyses and surveys as well as new computer-based methods are used: Continuous monitoring of interest in AI, relevant opinions and intended behavior is carried out via a monthly survey of the German population aged 18 and older who use the Internet at least occasionally. In addition, special surveys will address current and specific issues surrounding AI.
In parallel, a semi-automated topic analysis of media coverage will be carried out. This will make it possible to map the course of public and published opinion on AI. In the following, the findings will be deepened with manual content analysis and thus, among other things, the tenor of the reporting or the actor structures will be examined.
Since April 2021, the project has been funded by Stiftung Mercator for a period of three years. Previously, the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia funded the project for a period from January 2020 to March 2021.
Further information
Funding Source: Deutsch Polnische Wissenschaftsstiftung - Polsko Niemiecka Fundacja Na Rzecz Nauki
Principal Investigator: Malte Steinbach, Tobias Escher (Department of Social Sciences / Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy)
Duration: 05/2019 – 07/2021
Cooperating partner: Department of Sociology, Uniwersytet Warszawski, PL
Deliberation as a concept has been developed as an ideal-typical approach to renew public communication and participation in the political and social sciences and to enhance the legitimacy of political institutions and their decisions. How values and norms pertinent to the model of deliberation (e.g., rationality, interactivity, and openness) get incorporated into political practice due to legal requirements or local design decisions in order to increase the legitimacy of political decisions has been researched only scarcely.
Thus, the aim of the common project of researchers from the HHU and the University of Warsaw is to analyze the relevance of values and norms associated to the concept of deliberation in practices of public consultations by local administrations in Germany and Poland. We analyze how these practices compare to one another and through which factors they are shaped. For the purpose of this study, we will focus on public consultations as an institutionalized channel of communication between local governments and members of local communities.
We will begin the project with the analysis of the most significant EU documents as well as national, regional, and local legal requirements regarding public consultations in order to capture the formal and legal context of deliberation in public consultations. Followed by an investigation into the conduct of public consultations by representatives of German and Polish municipalities. The core element of the project will consist of an experiment involving municipal clerks carrying out tasks regarding the planning and conducting of public consultations with the use of the inDialogue software (open license, non-commercial software).
As a result, we will identify the routinely used procedures of public consultations in municipalities and compare them with the model of deliberative public consultations as described in the literature and identified in the course of our document analysis. We aim to explain institutional and other factors that can be responsible for differences in the clerks’ perceptions and performance in the two countries. Finally, we will develop a set of guidelines for how IT can better support the administrative processes of public consultations and implement them exemplary in the projects own inDialogue software.
Founding Source: Ministry of Culture and Science North Rhine-Westphalia, Funding line OERContent.nrw
Principal Investigator: Frank Leinen (Department of Romance Languages and Literatures), Christian Tagsold (Department of Modern Japanese Studies), Florian Trabert (Department of German Languages and Literatures)
Duration: 09/2023 - 08/2025
Cooperation partner: Stephan Packard (University of Cologne), Kathrin Chlench-Priber (University of Bonn), Markus Engelns (University of Duisburg-Essen)
This interdisciplinary project is financed via the programme OERContent.nrw. It aims at offering instructors and students in the humanities as well as in teacher training materials for working with comics, manga, graphic novels and other forms of sequential storytelling in an academic context.
The project has four main focuses. First of all, it will a) collate central aspects of the medial history of graphic storytelling and b) of the development and application of analytical methods as concerns speech bubbles, panels and cartoon images. It will also provide c) an overview of the discussion and application of research methods in cultural scholarship and d) the didactic uses of comics in the classroom. Through the OER content, students as well as instructors will acquire diverse competences in complex text/image media analysis, criticism of representation and the discussion of popular cultures and fan scenes. The resource will encompass complete digital classes, self-study units and modularised content for introduction into learning contexts. All resources will be usable in online and offline teaching and will be accessible for blended learning.
Workpackage: Explorative and in-depth case studies
Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Principal Investigator: Gerhard Vowe (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 02/2019 – 04/2022
Cooperating partners: Monika Jungbauer-Gans, Bernd Kleimann, Axel Oberschelp (DZHW), Martin Reinhart (Robert Merton Zentrum), Mathias Winde (Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft)
Research in homogeneous and heterogeneous collaboration contexts is becoming increasingly important. Cooperative approaches offer great potential through the combination of competencies, perspectives, experiences, resources, and personalities. But there are also various obstacles to fruitful cooperation. As part of the DEKiF joint project, the determinants and effects of cooperation problems in homogeneous and heterogeneous research clusters are examined and proposals for solving cooperation problems are derived.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Stefan Hartmann (Department of German Languages and Literatures)
Duration: 06/2022 – 05/2025
Cooperating partner: Antje Endesfelder Quick (Leipzig University), Nikolas Koch (LMU München)
This network brings together researchers working on multilingual first language acquisition from a usage-based perspective. It has two major goals: firstly, we want to consider the theoretical implications of the usage-based approach – which are largely based on studies of monolingual acquisition – for multilingual acquisition, thus refining and potentially extending the usage-based theory of language acquisition. This is closely related to methodological and corpus-linguistic questions that are discussed in the network. The second goal of the network is therefore to develop rich corpus-linguistic resources for the study of bilingual language acquisition as well as advanced quantitative methods for analyzing them.As for the theoretical goals, the network aims at addressing key research questions pertaining to multilingual language learning: The usage-based approach to language acquisition assumes that children learn their language(s) by abstracting away patterns from the concrete instances of language use they encounter. This raises the question which patterns are actually learnt, how patterns from more than one language interact in the process of multilingual language learning, and how these patterns correlate with the input the children receive. On the methodological side, a key tenet of usage-based research is identifying those patterns using data-driven statistical methods. Various approaches such as the traceback method or the Chunk-Based Learner have been developed in the context of usage-based language acquisition studies. It is one of the methodological goals of the network to further develop and refine these methods. Over the course of three years, we want to intensify existing collaborations between the network members and initiate new ones. The network members commit to pursuing a number of collaborative projects in different groups in order to tackle theoretical and methodological challenges and to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of multilingual language acquisition. At six project meetings, the network members discuss their projects with key researchers from the fields of usage-based linguistics, child language acquisition research, multilingualism, and corpus linguistics: Prof. Dr. Adele Goldberg (Princeton), Prof. Dr. Jeanine Treffers-Daller (Reading University), Prof. Dr. Hans-Jörg Schmid (Munich), Dr. Özlem Çetinoğlu (Stuttgart) and Prof. Dr. Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon University).
Workpackage: Preventing anti-Semitism in Franco-German school education
Funding Source: Federal Ministry of Education and Research
Principal Investigator: Ursula Hennigfeld (Department of Romance Studies)
Duration: 08/2021 – 07/2025
Cooperating partners: Marco Thomas Bosshard (Department of Romance Studies, Europa-Universität Flensburg) and Iulia-Karin Patrut (Department German Studies, Europa-Universität Flensburg)
The BMBF-Project "Prevention of Antisemitism in European School Education" (AIES) at the Universities of Düsseldorf and Flensburg explores the dynamics, manifestations and effects of historical and contemporary antisemitism in Europe and develops multilingual digital material for its prevention. The project refers to the subjects History, Politics, German (as a foreign language), French, Spanish and Religious Education. Non-university partners include the Fritz Bauer Institute on the History and Impact of the Holocaust in Frankfurt, the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, various German museums, memorials, documentation centers for the History of National Socialism as well as schools in Germany, France, Spain and Romania.
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Funding Source: National Endowment for the Humanities NEH (USA) - PW-277433-21
Principal Investigator: Kevin Tang (English and American Studies Department)
Duration: 07/2021 - 06/2024
Cooperating partners: Dr. Cordova, Dr. Ortiz, Dr. Moeller (University of Florida, USA)
The project, “Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South: Tailoring Education and Research through Natural Language Understanding”, involves the reformatting and annotation of 500 oral histories of African Americans from the Gulf South, representing the stories of people who lived through the transatlantic slave trade up to the present day, as well as the development of a new web search interface and 150 curriculum modules for K–12 educators. An interdisciplinary collaboration between Linguistics, Oral History program, and the Libraries will reanimate 500 interviews with African Americans in the Gulf South, a population absent from many other oral history collections, with rich annotations and a web-based customizable interface. Our design harnesses computational linguistic methods and is informed by the needs and expertise of three diverse user groups, resulting in a host of improved accessibility outcomes. For education, teachers will be provided an easy to use interface to enhance student engagement with localized curriculum using the interviews. For linguistics, researchers will have access to an unprecedented amount of spoken African American data to investigate African American language change and regionality, and racially-based biases in speech technologies. Finally, oral history programs across the country will be offered a new means of enhancing accessibility into their own archival collections.
Funding Source: National Science Foundation (USA) - NSF Award #2037266
Principal Investigator: Kevin Tang (Department of English and American Studies)
Duration: 09/2020 - 08/2023
Cooperating partners: Yong-Kuy Yoon, Ratree Wayland (University of Florida, USA)
Speech as a non-invasive biomarker could provide researchers and clinicians with new means to capture fine changes in speech articulation patterns associated with linguistic phenomena in the normal population or functional changes in articulation in individuals with disorders. The overarching goal of this project is to establish an evidence-based, quantified, data driven, non-invasive method for using speech as a biomarker for facile detection of cross-linguistic variation and patterns of articulatory change in various neuromotor disorders within the linguistics and biomedical realms. This interdisciplinary project has three interactive arms: the development of a smart, wireless, electropalatography (EPG) system, behavioral speech data collection for comparison with existing EPG systems, and machine learning for identifying patterns of tongue-palate contact that signify abnormal patterns of articulation. This work would lead to establishing a new techno-linguistic and techno-speech pathology disciplines and related curricula. SELMA performance will be disseminated through new courses, class lectures, conference presentations, publications, and mass/social media. PIs volunteer for minority programs.
The usage of speech sounds as a biomarker offers advantageous features such as non-contact detection and remote monitoring. However, the acoustic signature alone is not sufficient to provide reliable sensing for linguistic and clinical use. In this project, a unique real-time, multi-modal, wireless smart electropalatography (EPG) system for linguistic and medical applications (SELMA) is devised and implemented to provide additional oral sensing modalities, including precise position, size, pressure, and duration of tongue contacts with the palate in speaking. A pseudo-palate, the main apparatus of the system, is 1/20 the thickness of a typical pseudo-palate, minimizing the blockage of airflow during speech production and conform to the palate, reducing the discomfort of the wearer and offering a close-to-normal mouth condition during speech articulation. Wireless charging and communication are used increasing reliability and safety. The advantage of the SELMA device is evaluated via a behavioral linguistic experiment to assess detection of a common class of cross-linguistic, phonological processes known as spirantization, a process involving decreased precision of speech articulation. Machine learning models, integrating articulatory (i.e., EPG) and acoustic data, are used to predict degrees of lenition and subjective lenition ratings. By fine-tuning the models on latent speech patterns with big data of atypical speech from PD patients, intoxicated speakers and second-language accented speakers, the SELMA system will provide a unique form of diagnostics for medical and linguistic purposes. The usage of high resolution spatio-temporal information of tongue contacts during speech can be extended for facile monitoring of neurological diseases such as PD, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), traumatic brain injuries, and other neurological disorders. Further, SELMA will be inexpensive and small enough that can be used for monitoring treatment progress in pediatric articulation disorders affecting intelligibility, such as cleft palate, apraxia of speech, and Down syndrome. Future variations of SELMA may extend its utility to other disease monitoring with additional sensors integrated into the device, potentially allowing monitoring of cancer, HIV, smoking and sexually transmitted diseases using salivary biomarker sensors.
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Christiane Eilders (Department of Social Sciences/ Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy)
Duration: 2020 - 2023
Cooperating partner: Helmut Scherer (Department of Journalism and Communication Research, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media)
The project investigates the influence of personal and media information sources in individual communication networks on the perception of public opinion and on the formation of opinions on current topics. The focus is on the question of how people deal with contradictions in digital environments, for example, with the fact that contributions in mass media contradict user-generated contributions on digital platforms and that both are forwarded and commented on via social media by friends or colleagues who again have a different view.
To illustrate with an example: How do people process a “Tagesthemen” post arguing for a Corona-conditioned curfew when this post reaches them via the tweet of a colleague who in turn is critical of curfews? What is the impact of user comments on curfew by Facebook friends, and how do personal conversations about it affect one’s opinion?
The project is a cooperation with Prof. Dr. Helmut Scherer from the Department of Journalism and Communication Research, Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media and takes place at two locations. It builds on the theory of the silence spiral and other approaches to the influence of conformity. The empirical study includes surveys of an online panel and online diary studies of personal and media sources of information.
Funding Source: Federal Ministry for Education and Research
Principal Investigators: Heiko Beyer, Melanie Reddig (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 10/2020 – 09/2024
Cooperating partner: Netzwerk für Demokratie und Courage e.V.
The project examines whether and in which way radical political Islam together and in comparison with other political ideologies is responsible for increased experiences of discrimination, perceptions of threat, and behavioral intentions of Jews living in Germany. By means of a standardized online survey as well as qualitative interviews, both the prevalence and the causes of these three phenomena will be investigated and the significance of Islamist antisemitism as perceived by the Jewish community determined. The implementation of the results of the project will be carried out in close cooperation with a practice partner from the field of political education (Netzwerk für Demokratie und Courage e.V.).
Funding Source: DFG
Principal Investigator: Frank Marcinkowski (Department of Social Sciences)
Duration: 10/2021 – 09/2024
Cooperating partner: Matthias Kohring (University of Mannheim)
In the current Corona pandemic, science and individual scientists have become the focus of media attention. They are consulted for political decisions, have laid the foundations for protective measures against the virus and have critically examined them within certain disciplines. In addition to respectful treatment of scientists, however, hostility and threats against individual researchers have also become publicly visible. These range from questioning scientific statements to threats of violence. Science has become a source of polarization in times of Corona: On the one hand, the population shouts "Listen to science", on the other hand, there is talk of the "lockdown makers" and conspiracy ideologists demonstrate against members of the scientific community. In this sense, the project focuses on the question of whether and to what extent the pandemic may have changed the relationship between science and society.
Further information (German only)
Funding Source: Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet)
Principal Investigator: Siegfried Jaag (Department of Philosophy)
Duration: 01/2025 – 12/2026
Cooperating partner: Christian Loew (Umea); Heather Demarest (Boulder); Chris Dorst (Florida)
The laws of physics are unreasonably useful for creatures like us. Approximating these laws is the basis for physics as we know it and has led to numerous predictions, technological innovations, and explanations. But how can it be that finite beings like us can (approximately) know, let alone put to practical use, the fundamental laws of the universe? The project examines to what extent the usefulness of the physical laws is evidence that what counts as a law of physics is partly relative to our capacities and interests.