At the end of May, we finally had our first in-person team meeting in Damian’s garden! We enjoyed the nice weather, had good food and drinks, and heard quite some funny stories. Oh, and of course, we spent time discussing this project as a whole ;). Thank you so much Damian for hosting us!

A lit bit update on what we’ve been doing:

Monika has scraped text messages from over 170 public Dutch language Telegram chats and channels. She will use this historical data to understand the most prevalent narratives and communities that dominate the Dutch Telegram landscape across time, and to build a database of alternative news sources.

Zilin is now working on a framework for studying news on social media. And she will train models for classifying dutch news items based on multiple criteria (e.g., subjectivity, humorous elements, etc.).

Another exciting thing is that we are (secretly) planning a fun event for data collection in August! Shhh, we will announce it next month.

Stay tuned and, in the meantime, enjoy the summer!