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Computational Controversy

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Social Informatics (SocInfo 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10540))

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Abstract

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that cover all of the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://crowdflower.com.

  2. 2.

    http://data.crowdtruth.org.

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Acknowledgments

This publication was supported by the Dutch national program COMMIT/.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Benjamin Timmermans, Tobias Kuhn & Lora Aroyo

  2. University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Kaspar Beelen

Authors
  1. Benjamin Timmermans
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  2. Tobias Kuhn
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  3. Kaspar Beelen
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  4. Lora Aroyo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tobias Kuhn .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA

    Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia

  2. University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA

    Afra Mashhadi

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom

    Taha Yasseri

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Timmermans, B., Kuhn, T., Beelen, K., Aroyo, L. (2017). Computational Controversy. In: Ciampaglia, G., Mashhadi, A., Yasseri, T. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10540. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67256-4_23

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