Portfolio & Projects

I have experience in several areas:

Data Science and Data Journalism

Remove NA: A knowledge graph about queer history, (Prototype Fund 2022)

The Remove NA project links data science and domain knowledge with the goal of weaving queer data into the web of open, linked data. Results, an essay, and methodology are available on

The project was funded by Prototype Fund and the German Ministry of Science and Education.

Operation „Honigbiene“, (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)


Anyone entering China by land must know what to expect: The border police raids the smartphone, then an app extracts a lot of private information. We received the code of the surveillance app and analysed the code.

The story was awarded with Journalistenpreis für Informatik Universität Saarland and got a „honorable mention“ from the researchnetwork surveillance-studies.org.

„Blaue Bücher, rosa Bücher“ (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2019)

Pirates for boys and fairies for girls? We investigated 50k German language children’s books and identified enduring stereotypes around gender. I was primarily working on a network analysis. Nominated for the Digital Humanities Award 2018.

“Wie hat Ihr Stimmkreis gewählt?” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Writing by numbers: After an election there are two tasks for journalism. First, report the results instantly (which is easy) and second interpret the results (which is not that easy). We wanted to do these two things in an automated way and as fast as possible for all election districts in Bavaria and Hesse. The approach were auto-generated texts and visualisations based on the results of every single district in Bavaria and Hesse: Did a district vote extraordinarily? Similar to the national level? Just slightly different? The method for finding differences was the Jenks algorithm.

#analysis #datavis #textgeneration #datapipeline #rstats


Das gespaltene Parlament (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2018)

Using text mining in political reporting. How does a right-wing, populist party change the atmosphere and the debates in the German parliament? Answers can be found in the official protocols of the Bundestag. The story was awarded with the Nannenpreis 2019.

#textmining #datamining #dataanalysis #datavis #rstats


“Wie wir über Umfragen berichten” (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Show more uncertainty to be more precise. Traditionally, media outlets are reporting about a new poll in the following style:

If an election would be held today, party x would get y percent of the votes. This is a decline of z percent compared to the previous week.

Covering polls like this is oversimplifying and even dangerous. Polls have real impact on decisions of politicians and voters, e.g. due to feedback loops. Pollsters want to mirror the views of a whole electorate by asking 1000 to 2000 people. Of course, there is uncertainty. The approach: Making the visualization more complex, but more precise by showing the uncertainty.

#datavis #rstats #statistics #pollingdata


Der Facebook-Faktor – Wie das soziale Netzwerk die Wahl beeinflusst (Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2017)

Getting an idea of the blackbox Facebook: Investigating the political sphere on Facebook by crawling the sites of political parties and active users. We evaluated more than one million public Facebook likes from a little less than 5000 politically interested Facebook users.

Awarded with the Acatech prize for Tech Journalism 2017.

#socialmedia #datavis #analysis #rstats


Research

Digitization Strategies of German Federal States (Katharina Brunner, Andreas Jager, Thomas Hess, Ursula Münch), Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt):

How Can Politics Shape the Digital Transformation? The study traces the development of strategies at the state level and examines how defined measures can be steered and implemented.

https://www.bidt.digital/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/bidt_publikation_digitalisierungsstrategien_landscape_mockup-scaled.jpg
A fancy picture of the printed publication.

Software

I published the following open-source software packages:

Generative Art

The R package generativeart let’s you create images based on many thousand points. The position of every single point is calculated by a formula, which has random parameters. Because of the random numbers, every image looks different.


Destatis Cleaner

Update May 2020: This package is no longer needed. The Federal Statistical Office of Germany, Destatis, listened to it’s users: You can now download data as a flat file csv or use an API.

The csv files of Destatis, the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, don’t comply with common standards if a tidy, ready-to-use machine-readable dataset. This tools helps to jump start the data analysis by doing the time-consuming cleaning tasks:

You can find Destatis Cleaner on apps.katharinabrunner.de/destatiscleaner/

If you are an R user, you can work with the destatiscleanr package. You can find the code and instructions on Github


germanpolls

A few files of code to get German polling data from wahlrecht.de on to your computer: Github


Technical Writing/Tutorials