Computational Exchange on Wednesday
The Computational Exchange on Wednesday (ExMi) is a meeting series for computational researchers at the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich. We meet two to three times per semester, always on Wednesday at 12:00, in the big conference room at Akademiestraße 7, 6th floor and online via Zoom.
Not every session follows a fixed topic — you are welcome to bring your own computational questions, error messages, or work-in-progress. We are open topic-wise and always happy to see new faces. If you live in Munich or are visiting and interested in Computational Social Science, feel free to drop by or get in touch.
Upcoming talks — Winter term 2026/27
21 October 2026 — Veronika Ebner (University of Vienna)
Veronika will introduce a planned study on solutions-oriented environmental and climate change communication on TikTok. The study compares how media outlets, political parties and politicians, and environmental NGOs and activists from Austria and Germany communicate solutions to environmental problems. Using a Vision-Language Model (VLM), the analysis will examine how frequently solutions are addressed, what kinds of solutions are presented, their scale and sectoral focus, and whether potential limitations are acknowledged.
20 January 2027 — Christopher Klamm (University of Mannheim)
Christopher will introduce AI Conversational Interviewing as a method for collecting open-ended public opinion data at scale. The talk explores the analytical potential of conversational text data for research questions that go beyond traditional closed-ended survey items, evaluates the method’s practical viability based on participants’ experiences, and presents an experimental comparison of voice-based, chat-based, and free-choice interview modes.
Both talks start at 12:00 sharp and take place in the big conference room at Akademiestraße 7, 6th floor. The sessions are hybrid; remote participants can join via Zoom.
The Computational Exchange is a brown-bag meeting: bring your own lunch or join our pizza order. Add your choice under the food heading in the shared document by 09:00 on the day of the talk; the menu is linked there as well.
Materials from past sessions: GitHub repository
Past sessions
| Date | Topic | Presenter |
|---|---|---|
| 2022-06-02 | Kick-off meeting | Mario Haim & Patrick Parschan |
| 2022-06-22 | Machine learning, word embeddings & text as data | Mario Haim & Patrick Parschan |
| 2022-07-20 | Live coding: word embeddings application | Team Haim |
| 2022-11-02 | Clean code and code style | Julian Unkel |
| 2022-12-14 | Docker for reproducibility | Mario Haim & Roxana Portugal |
| 2023-01-25 | Data donations | Theo Araujo |
| 2023-05-17 | Using AI as a research method and research tool | Patrick Parschan & others |
| 2023-06-21 | Computational analysis of climate change related images | Isaac Bravo Lara |
| 2023-11-15 | Stance and sentiment detection with transformers | Sonja Häffner & Julian Walterskirchen |
| 2024-01-31 | tidytext | Patrick Parschan & Lara Kobilke |
| 2024-05-08 | The basics of regex | Dominik Leiner |
| 2024-05-29 | Interpretability & transparency of ML models | Philipp Knöpfle |
| 2024-07-17 | Intro to structural equation modeling in R | Magdalena Obermaier & Lara Kobilke |
| 2024-10-23 | Intro to coding with AI (ChatGPT, LM Studio, Cursor, Copilot) | Patrick Parschan |
| 2024-11-13 | The tech stack you need as a software developer in industry | Julian Unkel |
| 2024-12-11 | Topic modeling with transformers and BERT | Julian Hohner |
| 2025-02-05 | Multimodal analysis with embeddings | Nadezhda Ozornina |
| 2025-05-11 | rainer — an R package | Niklas Ippisch & Caroline Haensch |
| 2025-05-28 | LLM inference on the LRZ AI Systems | Tomas Ruiz |
| 2025-07-16 | Causal inference with unstructured data | Moritz Leitner |
| 2025-11-06 | Measuring your ecological AI and ML footprint | Sean Palicki |
| 2025-11-19 | Quantitative content analysis with LLMs | Michael Reiss |
| 2026-01-07 | A history of CCS methods | Luisa Kutlar |
| 2026-01-28 | newsflow project | Philipp Mendoza |
| 2026-06-17 | GESIS Methods Hub | Christina Viehmann |
| 2026-07-08 | Using the M3 API for news media analysis | Tizian Dippold |
| 2026-07-15 | Measuring crisis rhetoric using political speech data | Lukas Hetzer |