Observing Opinions

Measuring Opinionated Communication

Dig into the EU COST network OPINION with Wendo

The European Union’s (EU) COST (www.cost.eu) network OPINION (www.opinion-network.eu) is an international network of researchers collaborating to develop and integrate conceptual foundations, computational measurement strategies, and research agendas for the study of textual expressions of evaluative opinions. As a concerted effort to address one of the key challenges in the study of digital textual data, OPINION advances a trans-disciplinary, multilingual, culturally sensitive, and collaborative approach to studying opinionated communication.

This podcast allows you to dig into the network.

Please note that this podcast is based upon work from COST Action OPINION, CA21129, supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). COST ist a funding agency for research and innovation networks. Our Actions help connect research initiatives across Europe and enable scientists to grow their ideas by sharing them with their peers. This boosts their research, career and innovation.

In this episode, Dr. Aleksandar Tomašević from the University of Novi Sad takes us beyond text-based analysis to explore how emotions expressed in videos can be measured and understood. Aleksandar explains why studying non-verbal cues—especially facial expressions—is becoming crucial for understanding political communication online. He walks us through different methods for detecting these expressions, highlighting how machine learning and deep learning techniques enable computational analysis of emotions. Aleksandar also discusses the accuracy of machine-based emotion detection compared to human judgment and shares fascinating findings from his research on political leaders’ emotional expressions in video content. This conversation reveals how emotion analysis opens new doors in communication research.