Stuttgart’s Black Thursday on Twitter: Mapping Political Protests with Social Media Data

Abstract

Event detection based on textual data is an approach often used in the social sciences. The method has been used predominantly in the fields of international politics (Schrodt 2010) and public opinion research (Landmann and Zuell 2008). Event detection presupposes that major events leave traces in textual documents. By automatically identifying events in publicly available documents, researchers can establish timelines of events relevant to their research. For example, in international politics, researchers work on how to reliably identify political actors, time and topics from official documents, hoping to establish comprehensive and detailed maps of international treaties and conflicts. Based on these maps, they aim to develop models of the dynamics of conflict (Brandt et al. 2011). In public opinion research, one goal is to automatically deduce major events from newspaper coverage. This might be a first step in calculating the impact of these events on changes in public opinion (Landmann and Zuell 2008).