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Open Call project, 2022Misinformation campaigns characteristics

The goal of this project is to develop a software supporting researchers to investigate the content of disinformation campaigns worldwide. Using original misinformation data that the International Fact-Checking Network collects from across the globe, the aim of the software is to extract fact- and emotion-based text content, as well as facial expressions and body posture from the data posts. Ultimately, the developed software will help researchers map out the relationship between what is being shown in images and the accompanying text, thereby facilitating research on worldwide disinformation campaigns and their impact in the political sciences.

The SSC aids in the software development with three person/months. See the project repository on GitHub.

This research is carried out by Dr. Delia Dumitrescu, Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University.

The SSC has brought a crucial contribution to my project analyzing mis- and disinformation, by helping me employ state-of-the-art visual and textual analysis software tools to examine this type of communications. Their work is furthermore relevant for the larger community of scholars interested in media communication analysis, as the software instruments they developed for my project are assembled into the AI Media and Misinformation Content Analysis tool, which is freely available to use. I am very happy to have benefited so greatly from their expertise, and I've very much enjoyed our friendly interactions on a personal level.

Dr Delia Dumitrescu, Institute of Political Science (IPW)