MoWiKo Meeting in Heidelberg

One year after the start of the project, the entire group met in Heidelberg. Greeted by the first snow of the year and the Christmas market stalls that had already been set up but were still closed, we devoted ourselves to exchanging ideas.
Gruppenfoto des Teams, teils in Präsenz, teils in Zoom. Janine Dengler

22.11.2024

One year after the start of the project, the entire group met in Heidelberg. Greeted by the first snow of the year and the Christmas market stalls that had already been set up but were still closed, we devoted ourselves to exchanging ideas at the German Studies Seminar.

Janine Dengler (linguistics) presented the results of her master's thesis, a pilot study for her doctoral dissertation. Under the title "Discourse-strategic methods for asserting claims to validity in science communication," she examined the AI discourse. Initial findings on the relationship between technical expertise and moralization density were supplemented by further challenges such as the discourse-specific adaptation of the DiMi (Dictionary of Moral Indication Words). Based on the linguistic pilot study, the concept of moralization also requires more in-depth discussion and definition.

Elisabeth Does and Anna Klassen (philosophy) presented the manual coding of texts to date, based on the question of how moralizations occur in texts. The result was aspects under which moralizations can be analyzed in order to investigate whether they are appropriate or inappropriate. They are currently working on code books for the topics of energy security and genetic engineering as a sub-area of food security.

Lisa Gaffney (communication studies) presented the questionnaire for the first survey as part of the communication studies project. In this first step, attitudes and moral convictions on the topic of energy transition are being surveyed and correlations with, among other things, willingness to compromise, tolerance, and argumentation preferences are being examined.

Our meeting ended with a preview of two conferences next year: The day before, we had received confirmation of the conference "Epistemic Struggles in Polarized Discourses" organized by the research group in the KoKoKom project; the next Heidelberg "Language and Knowledge" conference will focus on the linguistic debate on AI.

Many thanks to student assistant Selin Koparan, who took the notes at this meeting!

 

Anna Klassen