CSH Talk by Emily Krüger (Intern)

Coming from a background in Political Science and Social Data Science, I am interested in how computational methods can help us understand and strengthen democratic processes. In recent years, conspiracy theories have increasingly gained traction to an extent that can pose a danger to our democratic system. My CSH internship and following Master Thesis project therefore focus on understanding the actors and dynamics of conspiratorial networks. The underlying  – and still mostly unexplored – dataset is the “Schwurbelarchiv”, which contains more than 25TB of data from Telegram groups and channels discussing different conspiratorial topics. With the aim of ultimately understanding how different actors contribute to the spread of ideas and behaviors within these groups, I analyzed the semantic patterns and linguistic features of these group members. I will present the preliminary results of this semantic analysis and provide an outlook on my Master’s thesis. In the thesis, I will combine linguistic features with network structures to create a typology of actors in the German-speaking conspiracy sphere on Telegram.