EPINetz: Exploration of Political Information Networks

Abstract

Different societal challenges, such as information overload, emerge due to the digital transformation of the media landscape. This also demands new competencies from citizens that often lack the means to contextualize arguments or actors and to understand their interrelationships in complex topics. The EPINetz project is an approach to bridge the outlined skills gap by developing an appropriate political information system. It provides access to political news collected from multiple data sources, including social media, and offers various network exploration capabilities. Different entities such as political actors or topics are extracted from collected data and shown within their respective contexts modelled as weighted and time-varying information networks. Thereby, interested citizens and especially schoolchildren can discover current political topics and understand relationships between relevant entities.