Citizen Mindscapes – Detecting Social, Emotional and National Dynamics in Social Media

We aim to build a research frontier for digital and non-digital social media analysis by focusing on Suomi24 – Finland’s largest topic-centric social media, and one of the world's largest non-English online discussion fora. We bring together researchers from social sciences, digital culture, welfare sociology, language technology, and statistical data analysis, developing new ways of exploring social and political interaction. We tackle Suomi24 from three perspectives: (1) the culture that produces social media, (2) novel visual tools and methods for studying the digital content, and, (3) a small number of spearhead research questions, such as characterizing the types of micro interaction, how heated debates might turn into political movements and how to detect emotional waves. In addition to an open data set made available through the Language Bank, the results will be a book on digital culture and digital analysis tools for social scientists.