I am a political scientist working at the Center of Methods in Social Sciences, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. For some years, I have been a replacement professor for Quantitative Methods and Statistics. My research in computational social science is organized around three larger themes: computational methodology, deliberation research, and transfer services.

The computational focus of my research is the development and application of text-as-data procedures. In particular, as part of the VisArgue project, I have (co-)developed an automated textual measure for deliberative quality. Also, I was involved in conceptualizing and testing visual applications to explore and analyze deliberative discourse.

Within deliberation research, I concentrate on the micro-foundations of group decision-making with a special focus on the role of communication and its dynamics within the process. I aim for complementing and enhancing the research on deliberative communication. 

The third research pillar, transfer services, aims at designing intervention systems: With ADD-up, we propose a real-time visual intervention system that supports participants in achieving a high deliberative quality. The project DeLab aims at developing a virtual moderator that uses artificial intelligence to recognize when discussions in social media are becoming increasingly destructive in character. The virtual moderator should then intervene in the discussion and help to prevent escalation. Both projects are funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

Disclaimer: This is my personal webpage; my university webpage is here: https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/443311.html. 

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