Conference: Computational Methods in Science Communication Research

On September 25 and 26, 2025, the conference Computational Methods in Science Communication Research – Opportunities, Challenges, and Current Applications took place at RPTU’s Landau campus. It was hosted by the SCOPE potential area (Societal Communication in Times of Permacrisis) and organized by Dr. Ines Welzenbach-Vogel and Dr. Berend Barkela.

Over two days, scholars from a wide range of disciplines including communication and political science, sociology, and computer science came together in an interdisciplinary exchange. Presentations addressed AI, automation, and large-scale text analysis in science communication research. Discussions focused in particular on the automatic identification of science in media and politics as well as the related ethical and societal implications.

A keynote and workshop by Dr. Maximilian Weber (Goethe University Frankfurt) on “Generative AI for Social Science Research” provided hands-on insights into using open-source large language models for annotation tasks.