The Ministry of Culture and Science of the German State of North Rhine-Westphalia has approved funding for a state-wide graduate institute on "Digital Societies". Within the institute, Sven-Oliver Proksch (Cologne Center for Comparative Politics) and Philipp Schaer (Professor for Information Retrieval at TH Köln, University of Applied Sciences) will conduct an interdisciplinary project on the influence of search engines on political opinion formation. The project will collect large amounts of web data from various search engines and analyze them using natural language processing and investigate the effects on opinion formation using laboratory experiments.

More information is available at http://graduiertenkolleg-digitale-gesellschaft.nrw/