The project Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD-up): Enhancing Large-scale Public Arbitrations in Real Time was funded 04/2017 – 12/2021 by the Volkswagen Foundation. ADD-up promotes interdisciplinary research in the field of computational social science. Principal investigators are Prof. Dr. Annette Hautli-Janisz (General and Computational Linguistics), Dr. Brian Plüss (Argumentation Mining and Visualization), and Dr. Valentin Gold (Political Science).

The aim of this project is to capitalize on the increasing digitalisation of society for advancing techniques of participatory democracy. For instance, analyses of sport events broadcast on TV (e.g. football games) are presented to the viewer by way of augmented reality, a technique which is used to enhance the experience of the viewer with computer-supplied data. The aim of the present project is to automatically monitor and enhance large-scale participatory processes in real-time. Through an interdisciplinary collaboration between Political Science (University of Göttingen, Germany), Linguistics (University of Passau, Germany) and Computer Science (University of Dundee, Scotland), we have developed ADD-up, an innovative system for Augmented Deliberative Democracy (ADD).

Please follow the links to a demonstration of the system:
  1. RSE Aberdeen Debate, English
  2. VisArgue Fracking Debate, German
This webpage gives an overview over the technical framework - a docker-framework controlling and combining individual modules for (1) text input, (2) analytics, (3) visualization:

ADDup Software Prototype