ADD-up

Logo of the VisArgue project. The project Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up): Enhancing Large-scale Public Arbitrations in Real Time was funded 04/2017 – 12/2021 by the Volkswagen Foundation. ADD-up promotes interdisciplinary research in the field of computational social science. Principal investigators were Prof. Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz (Computational Rhetoric and Natural Language Processing), Dr. Brian Plüss (Centre for Argument Technology), and Dr. Valentin Gold.

The aim of this project was to capitalize on the increasing digitalisation of society for advancing techniques of participatory democracy. For instance, analyses of sport events broadcast on TV (e.g. football games) are presented to the viewer by way of augmented reality, a technique which is used to enhance the experience of the viewer with computer-supplied data. The aim of the project was to automatically monitor and enhance large-scale participatory processes in a similar way. Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between Political Science (University of Göttingen, Germany), Linguistics (University of Konstanz, Germany - now Passau University) and Computer Science (University of Dundee, Scotland), we have developep ADD-up, an innovative system for Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD).

The technical framework was mainly developed in Göttingen and consists of a docker-framework controlling and combining individual modules for text input, analytics, visualization. More details can be found at https://addup.valentingold.de.

Besides the demonstration based on a German presidential debate, there are also two more videos available at https://addup.valentingold.de/demo/, e.g. a time lapse video of the VisArgue Fracking debate. Previously, we have published a prototype in collaborative work with VALIDA, see the video on Youtube: https://youtu.be/LhoLLcE9Vlw.

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