General information
This edition of the CLARIN Café is organized by CLARIN Ambassador Prof. Toine Pieters (Utrecht University).
(A full overview of the Café sessions scheduled can be found on the CLARIN Café page.)
Date: 27 May 2020
Time: 15:00 - 16:15 (CEST)
Venue: CLARIN virtual Zoom meeting
Registration
Please register for free using this link in order to receive the meeting room details.
Background
In times of crisis, public support for policy measures is important. With the outbreak of COVID-19, the public in various countries across Europe has shown general support for the advice provided by National Health Institutes and governments. However, it is uncertain how this support will evolve once the perceived urgency and rationale of the policy measures changes over time. We have already seen growing information divergencies between state-controlled sources and social media. Furthermore, we see interesting dynamics in Corona-related vocabularies across countries and cultures (social distancing, 1,5 meter society or economy, etc.). The timely understanding of changes in public opinion, sentiments and citizen or crowd behavior is important for policy makers and health care professionals and of course food for thought for academic scholars.
Digital Humanities in action
Digital Humanities scholars and data scientists across Europe can provide non-invasive tools and methods to study changes in public opinion and sentiments, the circulation of knowledge (balance between facts, rumors and fake-news) and in individual and crowd behavior. Thus, they can produce useful insights into public stances towards policies, public health interventions and remedies. However useful on a national level, it would be great to share the lessons learned within the broader European context. What differences and similarities can we pinpoint between the EU countries?
Goal of the CLARIN Café
This CLARIN Café aims to be a venue for the exchange of Corona-related research ideas and results. It provides a platform for discussion and inspiration on the possibilities of the CLARIN infrastructure to support research in terms of technologies and tools as well as interactions with fellow researchers in order to stimulate European collaborations and cross-national comparative Corona-related research.
Speakers and topics
- Shihan Wang will talk about the information of social media data during the Corona crisis, temporal national public sentiment during the time and a case study about how people stand for a certain policy measure changing patterns of social interaction / sentiments via social media due to Corona. Discussant for this topic will be Aleksei Kelli, Chair of the CLARIN Legal and Ethical Committee.
- Roland Geraerts will perform a real-time simulation of crowd behaviour to estimate the 1.5-meter post-Corona economy. Discussant for this topic will be Arjan van Hessen, member of the CLARIN User Involvement Committee.
- Thomas Schoegje will speak about how search engines can find (meaningful scientific) answers to the slatest questions about the Coronavirus. Discussant for this topic will be Bente Maegaard, Chair of the CLARIN Knowledge Sharing Infrastructure Committee.