An analysis on the emergence of socio-cultural conflicts through the language used in the media and online

The Ca' Foscari University of Venice, along with seven other universities, has been given four years and substantial EU funding to study how social and cultural conflicts are born and spread. This analysis will largely be based on looking at language and how it is used online and throughout social media.

The project, which is called ODyCCEuS (Opinion Dynamics and Cultural Conflict in European Spaces), received a loan of 5.8 million euro (divided into several groups) within the program Horizon 2020 Future and Emerging Technologies. There is a plan within the project to create an 'open' digital platform, Penelope, which will incorporate collection tools and data integration, analysis and geovisualization.

In addition, there will be two different tools created in order to assist with participation: the Opinion Observatory and the Opinion Facilitator. Thanks to these, citizens, associations and the media will be able to view and share data and tools to monitor, in real time and with increasing precision, places and times of growing crises and social conflicts.

Along with the above objectives for technological development, the project also intends to develop new theoretical tools for reading and modeling cultural conflict, new geometrical models, and an integration between these tools and concepts and the historical analysis (for example, the project will analyze the evolution of religious conflict and social exclusion in France over a period of over 200 years).

The Ca' Foscari team consists of Simon Levis Sullam (Department of Humanities), Marco Li Calzi (Department of Management) and Massimo Warglien (team coordinator, Department of Management).

Warglien speaks of the creation of ODyCCEuS: "The project started in early December of 2015. Three of ODyCCEuS promoters were in Brussels concluding a European project. The Belgian capital had just revoked the curfew that had been put in place following the Bataclan massacre. In the evening, Brussels was spooky. No one was in the street. We speculated on how best to continue our business together, and it seemed natural for us to culminate with a project on the serious cultural and social biases that are tearing Europe. Access to a mass of textual material offered online, and through social media, has helped to focus our attention on the relationship between language and conflict."

In this way, ODyCCEuS was born with the aim of developing new scientific and IT instruments in order to read the relationship between culture, language and social conflict and to translate them into a platform that is accessible for all. The ultimate goal of ODyCCEuS is to be able, one day, to help identify (and perhaps even help to solve) a conflict before it results in acts of violence.

A network of well-known university research centers (University Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris Diderot University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Amsterdam, University of Leipzig) were added to the initial project (promoted by Ca' Foscari University of Venice, the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig and Chalmers University), in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to media studies, from geography to citizen science.