On Friday, April 5, 2019, the research team of the NOHATE Project organized a one-day networking workshop in cooperation with the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society on techniques and challenges of the automated analysis of user-generated contents on the internet. Invited guests were colleagues of communication studies and computer science who are currently working on diverse research projects concerning similar research questions that are worked on in the joint project NOHATE. The objective of the meeting was to obtain an overview of current approaches and methods and to check how existing approaches in research could be combined.

Guests were Katharina Esau, Marc Ziegele, Dominique Heinbach and Anke Stoll (HHU Düsseldorf), Svenja Boberg and Tim Schatto Eckrodt (WWU Münster), Wiebke Loosen and Cornelius Puschmann (HBI Hamburg), Chris Biemann (Uni Hamburg), Ines Engelmann and Hanna Marzinkowski (FSU Jena), Teresa Naab and Constanze Küchler (Uni Augsburg), Jakob Jünger (Uni Greifswald), Julian Risch (HPI Potsdam), Liana Reiners (JGU Mainz), Diana Rieger (LMU München) as well as Annett Heft, Pablo Porten-Cheé, Susanne Reinhardt and Tim König (WI Berlin). The project partners of the NOHATE project, Alexander Löser, Betty van Aken, Arndt Allhorn and Sebastian Kuehn (Beuth HS Berlin) and Katharina Franko (VICO) participated in the workshop as well.

Questions, issues and potential solutions regarding the gathering and processing of data, the content-analytical coding and annotation, the evaluation and automatization as well as the storage of data and their post-processing were collectively discussed. Final aspects were the possibilities for cooperation and the planning of first steps towards increased networking activities. Due to the number of urgent questions in the research of user-generated contents, the heterogeneity of the subject of research and the high complexity of automated research techniques in particular, the participants do not only rate the increased networking in this field as profitable but also as crucial. The networking workshop in Berlin has led to a first step in this direction.

The workshop was financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the scope of the joint project “NOHATE – Overcoming Crises in Public Communication about of Refugees, Migration, Foreigners” (http://nohate.online).