Digital Infrastructure grant for media studies project TwiXL

The Platform Digital Infrastructure SSH has granted funding of € 978.000 to TwiXL: An infrastructure for cross-media research on public debates in its 2020 Digital Infrastructure SSH Call. The project is led by Prof. Dr Julia Noordegraaf (UvA) and brings together researchers from UvA, SURF, KB, NISV, and UG. Prof. Dr Marcel Broersma of the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies (CMJS) is a co-applicant. CMJS will be appointing a post-doctoral researcher to the project for a period of three years.

TwiXL develops an infrastructure that enables SSH researchers to systematically examine current and emerging public debates on crucial societal issues in the Netherlands. The proposed infrastructure will be developed along the following three axes:

1. Deep – continuing and making accessible the TwiNL collection, containing 50% of all Dutch language tweets (2011-), allowing for a systematic exploration of the Dutch Twitter sphere on any societal topic.
2. Broad – curating and making accessible Dutch language collections of social media and web data, as well as newspaper reports, radio and television broadcasts on prominent societal issues (2020-2025), enabling innovative cross-media research.
3. Live – facilitating real-time streaming data processing and analysis of Twitter-data, allowing for live monitoring of online public discourse.

Access to all three collections will be provided through a user-friendly web interface and Jupyter Notebooks for more advanced analyses. To develop the new infrastructure and demonstrate its value for research, a team of developers at SURF, KB, and NISV and two postdocs—at UvA and RUG—will closely work together with SSH researchers in proof-of-concept research projects. The infrastructure will be embedded in the CLARIAH Media Suite and the planned ODISSEI Media Content Analysis Laboratory.

After a careful review process consisting of several steps, the PDI-SSH accepted 12 out of 33 applications. Read more on the other applications on the PDI-SSH website.