Tango on a Tightrope

'Tango on a Tightrope - An Investigation of Media-Politics Dynamics in Ten Years of EU Crises' (Oct-2018 - September 2022)

'Tango on a Tightrope' was my personal research project investigating media-politics dynamics during ten years of EU crises: On the one hand, I looked at executives' crisis communication in the form of press releases; on the other hand, news media 'EU crisis coverage' was analysed to understand who is leading 'the tango'. All data was collected and analysed relying on computational approaches, i.e., web scraping routines and automated content analysis.

The project was conducted at the University of Vienna's Computational Communication Science Lab, an interdisciplinary research unit led by Hajo Boomgaarden and Annie Waldherr. It was funded by the Austrian Science Fund in the Hertha-Firnberg Program (234,210 €; Grant Number T-989; own role: Principal Investigator). 

Moreover, a complementary study focusing solely on the case of Austria was funded by the Austrian National Bank's Aniversary Fund (111,000 €; Grant Number 18120; own role: Co-Principal Investigator (together with Hajo Boomgaarden) for two years. Collaborators in this complementary project were Tobias Heidenreich and Nina Kriegler. 

The dataset of press releases collected in the context of these projects was published in the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA) in 2022 (see below for reference and link).

Published Peer-reviewed Papers:

Eisele, Olga, Tobias Heidenreich, Olga Litvyak & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2023): Capturing a News Frame - Comparing Machine-Learning Approaches to Frame Analysis with Different Degrees of Supervision. Communication Methods and Measures.  

Eisele, Olga, Tobias Heidenreich, Nina Kriegler, Pamina Syed Ali & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2023): A Window of Opportunity? The Relevance of the Rotating EU Presidency in the Public Eye. European Union Politics.

Eisele, Olga & Sanja Hajdinjak (2022): Entrenching Positions? The Dynamics of Brexit Negotiations Mirrored in British, Irish, and EU Executives' Speeches. Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

Brändle, Verena K. & Olga Eisele (2022): A Thin Line: Governmental Border Communication in Times of European Crisis. Journal of Common Market Studies. 

Heidenreich, Tobias, Olga Eisele, Kohei Watanabe & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2022): Exploring Engagement with EU News on Facebook: The Influence of Content Characteristics. Politics & Governance 10(1), 121-132.

Eisele, Olga, Olga Litvyak, Verena K. Brändle, Paul Balluff, Andreas Fischeneder, Catherine Sotirakou, Pamina Syed Ali & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2021): An Emotional Rally: Exploring Commenters' Responses to Online News Coverage of the COVID-19 Crisis in Austria. Digital Journalism, 10(6), 952-975.

Eisele, Olga, Petro Tolochko & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2021): How do executives communicate about crises? A framework for comparative analysis. European Journal of Political Research, 61(4), 953-972.

Datasets

Eisele, Olga, Tobias Heidenreich & Hajo G. Boomgaarden (2022): x-pr: A Dataset of 12 Years of eXecutives' Press Releases. AUSSDA: Vienna.