In this episode, listeners will learn about Actantial Networks—graph-based representations of narratives where nodes are actors (such as people, institutions, or abstract entities) and edges represent the actions or relationships between them.

The one who will present these networks is our guest Armin Pournaki, a joint PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences and the Laboratoire Lattice (ENS-PSL), who specializes in computational social science, where he develops methods to extract and analyze political narratives using natural language processing and network science.

Armin explains how these methods can expose conflicting narratives around the same events, as seen in debates on COVID-19, climate change, or the war in Ukraine. Listeners will also discover how this approach helps make large-scale discourse—from millions of tweets or political speeches—more transparent and interpretable, offering tools for studying polarization, issue alignment, and narrative-driven persuasion in digital societies.

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Armin Pournaki's Webpage

Twitter/X

Bluesky

Papers in focus

How influencers and multipliers drive polarization and issue alignment on Twitter/X, 2025

A graph-based approach to extracting narrative signals from public discourse, 2024

Trump und der Zoll-Wahnsinn