From Physics to Political Narratives

Armin Pournaki has successfully completed his doctoral thesis on “Computational Approaches to the Analysis of Political Narratives”. He has now moved to the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern, where he will contribute to the development of the Digital Society Lab. Congratulations!

Armin originally studied theoretical physics at TU Berlin and came to our institute for his master’s thesis in the Horizon project ODYCCEUS. He then pursued a joint PhD in cotutelle between our institute (supervised by Eckehard Olbrich and Jürgen Jost), the École Normale Supérieure (Thierry Poibeau), and the médialab at Sciences Po (Jean-Philippe Cointet).

In his dissertation, Armin developed formal methods to analyze polarization in social networks and to extract political narratives from large text corpora. Narratives are powerful discursive tools that play a central role in political communication. Cognitively, they serve as complexity-reduction mechanisms that help people make sense of political reality: By weaving complex political issues into easily understandable stories, political actors can use them to persuade others and mobilize their supporters.

Using computational approaches based on natural language processing and graph theory, Armin’s work allows for the systematic analysis of narratives in large corpora and revealed their role in phenomena such as polarization and issue alignment.

We wish Armin all the best and continued success in this next step of his career!