Patrick Schwabl
Welcome!
My name is Patrick, I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Computational Communication Research at the Department of Media and Communication at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Germany.
My Ph.D. thesis is supervised my Prof. Mario Haim and Prof. Barbara Plank.
In my thesis I use deep learning methods to find valid numerical measurments of political positions from textual data. In one of my fist conference presentations and in this preprint I sketch my ideas in more detail.
Research Interests
- Spatial models of politics: political position embeddings, text as data, measurment validity
- Natural Language Processing: transformers, contextualized word embeddings, multimodal embeddings
- Algorithmic Curation: search engine results during elections, agent-based testing
News
- [April 2023] I was awarded a scholarship (3000€ per year for 4 years) for my PhD project by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation. I will be part of the bidt young talents program.
- [April 2023] I was awarded a scholarship (2000€) for a stay in Isreal by the Bavarian Research Alliance. I will be in Israel in fall 2023.
- [March 2023] My abstract and presentation on “Computational scaling of political positions from textual data using word embeddings” was accepted for the CompText conference 2023.
- [January 2023] Our (with Mario Haim and Julian Unkel) paper “From auditing to testing: Adequate experimental designs to study algorithmic content curation” has been accepted for ICA 2023
- [January 2023] My first single-authored paper “Computational scaling of political positions from textual data using word embeddings” has been rejected for ICA 2023. Maybe next time :) I uploaded it as a preprint to SocArXiv. If you’re interested in word embeddings and political positions let me know what you think or what I could improve the paper. :)
- [October 2022] I have been elected as student and early career preresentative of ICA’s Computational Methods Division. Thanks everyone for voting! :)
- [March 2021] I started a full time position as Ph.D. stundent and research assistant at the chair for Computational Communication Research in Munich
Publications
Book chapters
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In C. Holtz-Bacha (Ed.), Die (Massen-)Medien im Wahlkampf: Die Bundestagswahl 2021. Wiesbaden: Springer V, 2023
Conference posters and papers
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DGPuK Methods Conference 22
23. Tagung der Fachgruppe Methoden der Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft der DGPuK, Munich, Germany, 5-7 October 2022 (Session Panel: Visualisierung, Part 2) -
TADA22
4th Text as Data Conference 2022, Cornell Tech, New York City, 6-7 October 2022 (Session A, Part 8) -
ICA22
72nd Annual International Communication Association Conference (72nd ICA Conference), Paris, 26-30 May 2022 (Session 3226, Part 6)
Preprints
Preprint
Journal papers
Soon to come ;)
Other
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Talk
How (not) to measure political positions using contextual word embeddings in multi-party systemsPresented to NLP Munich NLP Munich, 20 April 2023 -
Talk
How (not) to measure political positions using contextual word embeddings in multi-party systemsPresented at Lunchbreak event of the Junior Scholar Network Political Communication (NaPoKo), 18 April 2023
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MA
Master's Thesis, University of Regensburg, 2021, Supervised by Prof. Bernd Ludwig and Dr. David Elsweiler -
BA
Bachelor's Thesis, University of Regensburg, 2019, Supervised by Dr. Maximilian Grasl and Prof. Dr. Melanie Walter-Rogg -
Talk
Political position scaling with word representations (from contextualized word embeddings)Presentation at the workshop on AI-Humanity-Society hosted by LMU Munich and TAU University, 05-09 December 2022 -
Talk
Algorithmische Biases in Suchmaschinen im Bundestagswahlkampf 2021 [Algorithmic biases in search engines during the German federal election 2021]Presented at the sprint review of the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation, 21 September 2021
University teaching & other courses
- Crash course introduction to machine learning at the preconference hackathon during ICA 2023
- Introduction to data analysis with SPSS at LMU Munich, 2023
- Political communication during the Ukraine war at LMU Munich, 2022
- Tutor for introduction to Communication Science at LMU Munich, 2022
- 3 Day course on machine learning at Bamberg Graduate School of Social Science, 04-06 April 2022
- Introduction to data analysis with R at University of Regensburg, 2019, 2020, 2021
- Introduction to data analysis with SPSS at University of Regensburg, 2018, 2019, 2020
- Tutor for introduction to Political Science methodology at University of Regensburg, 2018
Services
Organizations
- Student and early career preresentative, Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association; term starting May 2023
Conference Reviewer
- International Communication Association conference 2023
- Jahrestagung der Fachgruppe Methoden der DGPuK 2022
- International Communication Association conference 2022
Other
I co-host and organize a in-person coding club (aka computational exchange on wednesday) three times every term. Among others, we’ve talked about topics like code style, word embeddings, docker, or data donations in the past. We are very open topic-wise, and also alway welcome new faces! If you live in Munich or are around and interested in Computational Social Science, drop me an Email (p.schwabl@lmu.de)
Funding and scholarships
- 3000€ per year for four years as part of the bidt your talents program by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation
- 2000€ for a research stay in Isreal by the Bavarian Research Alliance