Digital Democracy LabAn Infrastructure to Study the Implications of
Digital Technology for Democracy
Fabrizio Gilardi
University of Zurich
Hertie School of Governance, BerlinNovember 13, 2019(Updated November 12, 2019)
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Focus: political implications of digital technology
1. Political communication and opinion formation2. State-citizen interactions (eGovernment)3. Political participation (civic tech)
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A telescope for digital democracy
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An infrastructure for data collection and analysis
SocialMedia
Pressreleases TV
Speeches
Newsmedia
...
Research
Outreach
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Science Cloud Infrastructure
Data Ingestion & Preprocessing Data Persistence Postprocessing
Elasticsearch Clusters
Cluster I Cluster II Cluster III
Call Level Interface
Data Preprocessing
JSON Documents
Data IngestionPipelines
JSON Backup
Web-GUI Web-GUI SSH Shell Access Web-GUI (SSH)
Compute Servers
Trigger Jobs
Data Extraction
Kibana
Job Handling
Index CIndex B
Index A
Compute
R Studio
Compute
dcron (distributed cron jobs)Cluster I Cluster II Cluster III
ClassificationAlgorithmsAnnotationEntity RecognitionArgumentExtractionSentiment Analysis...
DockerContainers
Logfiles & co.
...
Newspapers
API Streaming
Webscrapers
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Data ingestion and preprocessing
≻ Distributed Cronlike (d-cron) Scheduler (three nodes with 4virtual CPUs, 16GB of RAM each)
≻ Python-based software developed by UZH Science Cloud tomanage the processes
≻ Flexible scheduling of ingestion and preprocessing tasksregardless of language (R, Python, bash, etc.)
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Data persistence
≻ Three Elasticsearch clusters (12 virtual cores, 48GB RAM)maintained by UZH Science Cloud
≻ Database updated daily from d-cron
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Postprocessing and analysis
≻ Three RStudio servers≻ Supervised classifications≻ Topic modeling≻ Named entity recognition≻ Sentiment analysis≻ …
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Pilot study: Swiss national elections 2019
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Grüne SP SVP
CVP FDP GLP
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Media (w/o president)
Media
Candidates
Media (w/o president)
Media
Candidates
Percentage of women
Swiss national elections 2019
Women candidates are underrepresented in the media
(84 newspapers, 54'573 articles, Jan−Sep 2019)
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Next steps
≻ Basic research, within the DigDemLab≻ Basic research, with cooperations
· Technical, legal, and practical issues· Incentive structure
≻ Applied research (selectively)≻ Community building≻ Secure mid-term funding
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