Project description: The observatory is aiming to create the technical and human infrastructure needed to continuously monitor issues and cases that are politically and socially relevant in contemporary Danish society. The primary focus is on digital media and the various arenas they consist of. Examples of digitally embedded arenas are: Search engines, online news sites, individual platforms (Facebook, Telegram, Bluesky etc.). The Issue Observatory is conceptualised as a modular infrastructure where digital tools and analytical procedures are gradually developed to allow for coverage of more arenas with the purpose of demonstrating how various actors position themselves discursively in relation to a specific case or issue through their choices to use certain words, images and links in their digital communication.
Status: We are currently in the progress of developing a prototype for a tool called Issue Observatory Search. Its purpose is to allow a researcher to specify a list of keywords related to case or issue and get a network visualization connecting websites and the words or general discourse they are partial to using in response to said issue or case. This is achieved by automatically querying various search engines and scraping content from the top resulting websites. The current version of the codebase is available on our github.
Contact: Andreas Birkbak and Jakob Bæk Kristensen