Open Password – Thursday June 30, 2022
Double issue: #1099 and #1100
Open Password – Willi Bredemeier – Martin Thomas – DGI-Stammtisch – Journalism – Online Only – Michael Klems – Open Password Archive Plus
Willi Bredemeier – Elisabeth Simon – German Library Institute – International Libraries – Internet as a Promise – Internet as Regular Operation – Fake News – Mobile Communication – Education and Democratization Mission of Libraries – Erda Lapp – Silke Sewing – Renate Zimmermann – Economization – Helga Schwarz – Electronic Specialist Information – Federal Ministry for research and technology – Leibniz Association – European Commission – Password – Open Password – The other local novel – Ruhr area – Gerda Bredemeier – Books that moved us – Against hurdles and isolation – Lukas Podolski – Tagesspiegel
PsychTopics – Psychology – André Bittermann – ZPID – Sarah Marie Müller – Jonas Rieger – TU Dortmund – Text Mining – Big Literature – Target groups – Corona – Science Council – Climate Change – Migration – Demographic change – Automated analysis of large amounts of text – Topic Modeling – IdaPrototype – RollingLDA – PubPsych – R Shiny – R programming language – Topics – Prevalence of topics – Publication lag – Top terms – Evolution terms – Temporary shifts – Labels – Classification categories – Topic evolution – Current trends – Social relevance – PSYNDEX – Research syntheses – PsychOpen CAMA – International databases – Preprints – Conference programs – Twitter mining
FootyStats – Football Statistics – Online Platform – Premier League – Bundesliga – UEFA Champions League – Germany Launch – App Store – Google Play
- The penultimate edition of Open Password
II.
Open password:
Countless useful, interesting, sometimes polemical information (Martin Thomas)
III.
Title 1:
A Farewell to a Writer:
Willi Bredemeier – colleague – partner – friend – by Elisabeth Simon
Title 2:
PsychTopics: How to keep track of the psychology research landscape – By André Bittermann (ZPID), Sarah Marie Müller (ZPID) and Jonas Rieger (TU Dortmund)
Football: The world’s largest online platform for football statistics starts in Germany
The penultimate edition of Open Password
This is the penultimate edition of Password. The final issue will be sent out this evening and may not reach you until Friday morning, July 1, 2022.
This edition contains, among other things, two further appreciations of my work. More letters about my work arrived. Some of them were very personal and cannot be published. I thank them and all of you from the bottom of my heart!
Willi Bredemeier
OpenPassword
Tons of useful, interesting,
sometimes polemical information
Dear Mr. Bredemeier,
At the DGI get-together in Frankfurt I accidentally found out that you intend to discontinue “Open Password”, this time for good. I can understand this decision, after all you edited, looked after and successfully placed the publication well beyond its usual age. Over 3,000 subscribers speak a clear language in our manageable industry!
I would like to thank you very much for many years of providing countless, useful, interesting, sometimes polemical information. I always read the printed magazines. We became aware of the magazine very early on and subscribed to it straight away. This way you could always stay up to date. Through pre-selection and critical evaluation, you have relieved your recipients of a lot of work. This is how good journalism should work!
They saw early on that the printed journals would get into difficulties with the spread of the Internet and therefore switched to “Online Only”. I also followed this medium and learned a lot of useful things from it. I think it’s nice that Mr. Klems is taking over the archive. This way you can research one or another article again.
I wish you all the best for the coming time without the pressure of publication! “Retirement” now offers more time to pursue the many projects and ideas you still have up your sleeve. In this sense: “ad multos annos!
Kind regards, Martin Thomas, Mannheim
A Farewell to a Writer
Willi Bredemeier – colleague – partner – friend
By Elizabeth Simon
Elisabth Simon at the Leipzig Book Fair
When I was entrusted with the small headquarters for foreign contacts at the German Library Institute, I saw this as a great personal opportunity. In fact, my encounters with librarians from other countries introduced me earlier and more thoroughly to the development and work of libraries in the Western world. This was particularly true of libraries in England, France and the United States. As the Internet rapidly expanded and developed, we Germans initially lagged behind. But interest in this country was soon huge too. Just for example: Ms. Simon, you have good contacts with the Amerikahaus. Can you convey that we are informed about this new medium, the Internet? A colleague came with these words from the DBI towards me.
We weren’t just interested, we were enthusiastic. Everything wouldn’t get better with the Internet, and we were the ones who would help shape the new world. Here too, just for example: Eastern European countries would be able to freely use the well-developed holdings of academic libraries. Everyone would be able to communicate with everyone around the world, cooperate and participate in the communities of their choice. A big push towards democratization was ahead of us.
Today that enthusiasm has evaporated. The improvements that the Internet has brought with it are now taken for granted and most of the time, the upcoming improvements are not about big things, but about regulations in detail. On the other hand, the dark sides of the Internet have become so great that one might wonder whether they currently predominate. The spread of fake news by authoritarian regimes and conspiracy theorists has led to the erosion of liberal democracies, while the demand for more information literacy among citizens sounds like a call in the dark forest. Significant parts of our network have fallen into the hands of sinister figures and institutions. Smartphones and other mobile communications in particular have changed our habits to such an extent that we don’t know whether we control the machines or they control us.
Where has the education and democratization mission of libraries, which is still invoked in Sunday speeches, gone? There is no doubt that a lot has happened at regional and local levels, in many cases across institutional and sometimes national boundaries. Libraries can be found in the book I published and edited by Erda Lapp, Silke Sewing, Renate Zimmermann and Willi Bredemeier . Guide to the future. Projects and examples (Berlin 2021) many examples worth imitating. Nevertheless, these projects are not interlinked in such a way that, taken together, they could result in a “critical mass” that ensures continuous progress across the broad spectrum of libraries and widespread acceptance in society, politics and the public. When things get serious, all too often the pathos in favor of the libraries no longer has any impact and the savings commissioner always has the last word.
Not that there weren’t comprehensive approaches. They just don’t get there. This also applies to the ambitious agenda of the German Library Institute. I have also published the story of the decline and fall of the DBI ( Helga Schwarz, The German Library Institute – In the field of tension between mission and interest, Berlin 2017 ). The attempt at a national special approach to developing electronic specialist information – the Federal Ministry of Research and Technology was in charge at the time – also failed, this time mainly due to the triumph of international, primarily Anglo-Saxon, information providers. The European Commission set itself big goals and mobilized significant financial resources, especially in the early years of the Internet. But those who were supposed to implement the Commission’s intentions as project sponsors hardly understood its requirements and often balked at the over-bureaucratization of research management by a bloated administration.
In this context, Willi Bredemeier was and is a rare stroke of luck because, despite all his attention to the individual, he maintained perspective, offered us orientation and never lost himself in the particularity of interests. Bredemeier also denounced grievances and criticized the specialist information policy, which for several years was almost dependent on a single state research manager, including at the procedural level. He praised the achievements of individual specialist information institutions, but criticized the Leibniz Association for leaving the affiliated institutions in the dark about extensive changes to their evaluation criteria. He also made constructive suggestions and, if in his opinion they were not well received quickly enough, implemented them himself in books and events. After his organ “Password” was commercially successful from 1986 to 2016 and had outlived competing publications, he transformed “Password In 2016 he converted it into the open access project “Open Password” in order to give back to society some of the positive things he had learned.
In 2020, my publisher published “The Other Homeland Novel” by Willi and Gerda Bredemeier with autobiographical references, in which the authors, among other things, relentlessly revealed how particular interests in politics and business prevented the modernization of an entire region, the Ruhr area. In 2022, Willi Bredemeier asked 41 authors in Books that Moved Us to describe which book had particularly influenced them and perhaps even changed their lives. These non-commercial activities also reflected his curiosity about new developments and experiments, his devotion to books and his love for people. In addition, Willi Bredemeier is a loving husband, father and grandfather and seems to be addicted to football.
Bredemeier’s life and work were always a struggle against hurdles and isolation. This makes him valuable as a colleague and friend. Books? I don’t read it , said Lukas Podolski in the Berliner Tagesspiegel on June 4th . Bredemeier would never say this. So we are faced with the puzzle of whether he is so valuable to us because we can talk to him often and for a long time about books or because he is simply a good and interesting person who we not only want to talk to often and again, but also on us enjoy every encounter. We don’t know and maybe that’s a good thing.
PsychTopics
How to keep track of
the psychology research landscape
By André Bittermann (ZPID), Sarah Marie Müller (ZPID)
and Jonas Rieger (TU Dortmund)
Digitalization and globalization are changing and accelerating the ability to store and exchange information. This also has an impact on science: In order to keep track of the flood of information, researchers and teachers need help, as do those interested in science from journalism, politics and the public. PsychTopics ( www.psychtopics.org ) is one such service from the Leibniz Institute of Psychology: text mining is used to identify research topics and
-identified trends in psychological research in an automated process.
The global number of research publications has been growing exponentially since the middle of the 20th century (Bornmann et al., 2021). In these times of “big literature” (Nunez-Mir et al., 2015), even experts find it increasingly difficult to stay up to date with topics and trends in a research field – especially when it concerns longer periods of time in an entire field scientific discipline. This flood of information also affects students who want to familiarize themselves with a research area and its historical development and are looking for suitable literature. Science journalists are particularly interested in current research trends, as they usually rely on the assessment of individual experts. Ultimately – even beyond the COVID-19 pandemic – a solid data basis is important to assess whether a science is addressing society’s challenges. For psychology, for example, the Science Council (2018) listed climate change, migration and demographic change among the topics where psychological specialist knowledge is required.
_____________________________________________________
Text mining and shiny app to deal with the flood of information
_____________________________________________________
How can you keep track of the ever-increasing volumes of specialist literature? Fortunately, digitization and global networking not only contribute to the problem, but also to its solution: the computing power and memory of even conventional notebooks now make it possible to use algorithms for the automated analysis of large amounts of text and thus reduce the flood of data to central patterns using computers. Such methods are called text mining and include a variety of procedures. These include, for example: counting words from certain categories (e.g. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count , Pennebaker et al., 2007) – determining the affective content ( sentiment analysis ; e.g. Feldman, 2013) – recording semantic relationships ( word embeddings , e.g. Devlin, 2019) and uncovering central topics ( topic modeling , e.g. Blei et al., 2003).
The latter, i.e. the automated discovery of topics, is the focus of this article and is one of the three building blocks of PsychTopics ( www.psychtopics.org ), the Leibniz Institute of Psychology (ZPID)’s offering for exploring psychological research topics and trends ( Illustration 1). The ZPID is the “Public Open Science Institute” for psychology and produces the reference database for psychological literature from German-speaking countries with PSYNDEX ( www.psyndex.de ). The literature references in PSYNDEX (second component) represent the text corpus that is analyzed using automated methods for topic identification (topic modeling). Specifically, ldaPrototype (Rieger et al., 2020) is used to generate the basic model of the topics, as well as RollingLDA (Rieger et al., 2021) to update the topics annually.
So that the topics found in this way are easily accessible in the text corpus of scientific publications, they are presented interactively in an easy-to-use interface (third component). With the help of the app, users can search for relevant literature on the topics in PubPsych ( www.pubpsych.de ), the free search portal for psychology publications, with just one click. R Shiny (Chang et al., 2021), a software package in the statistical programming language R for easily designing interactive web applications, is used to create the user interface . R is widely used in science (Muenchen, 2019), so app programming with R Shiny is particularly suitable for modifying it for other databases or scientific areas according to the special needs of other scientific communities.
Figure 1: The building blocks of PsychTopics.
PSYNDEX is the psychological database of the Leibniz Institute of Psychology.ldaPrototype and RollingLDA are methods of machine learning and text mining to automatically identify topics in continuously growing text corpora.
R Shiny is a software package for implementing interactive apps using the statistical programming language R.
_____________________________________________________
How the algorithm finds topics
_____________________________________________________
In very simple terms, the automated finding of topics with topic modeling happens as follows: After combing through the texts several times, the algorithm learns which words are often used together in the publications. These groups of related words represent so-called “topics”. For example, if the terms “refugees”, “symptoms”, “trauma”, “disorder”, “childhood” and “depression” are used in many studies, they are used at the end of the analysis displayed together as a topic, which in this case can be interpreted under the title “Trauma disorders in refugee children”. It should be noted that words are not always assigned to the same topics. Rather, the same word can be assigned to different topics in two different places; namely when this is more likely due to the co-occurrence of other specialized words in the same publication.
Based on the publication year of the texts, the prevalence of the topics over the years can be evaluated, i.e. how many articles have been published on the topic. Since more publications are constantly appearing, PsychTopics uses a special variant of topic modeling that reacts flexibly to new texts: RollingLDA (Rieger et al., 2021) assigns new texts to the topics learned so far. On the other hand, it is able to reflect changes in the content of the topics. In PsychTopics, the topic Miscellaneous Disorders ? Trauma shows that the above example topic was less prevalent in the 1980s and at the same time was more characterized by publications that described neurological conditions such as “dementia”, “schizophrenia” and “depression” in a more general way Address form. Over the years, and especially from 2001 onwards, the topic became more specialized. This was accompanied by a more prominent appearance of the terms “post-traumatic”, “PTSD” and “trauma”, as well as “childhood” from 2012 and “refugee” from 2018 (Figure 2).
Psychology has increasingly addressed the topic of “flight and migration” as a result of the “refugee crisis” (Bittermann & Klos, 2019). A time delay in the emergence of the topic can be explained by a “publication lag” between the first study idea and the publication of the article.
Figure 2:
Change in content of the topic “Various disorders ? trauma” between 2015 and 2019.
From 2018, the topic is also characterized by the term “refugee”. The arrow in the topic title indicates that the topic has been narrowed down by the authors over the years.
_____________________________________________________________________
How automatically created topics are interpreted
_____________________________________________________
The algorithm therefore generates a group of words that together characterize the topic in terms of content. The so-called global top terms , e.g. B. on the trauma topic are determined according to the probability of occurrence of the words over the entire study period. On the other hand, looking at the Evolution Terms offers a look at the year-specific words. The probability of occurrence of the words in this topic for a specific year is determined. In addition, the words are weighted for these annual top terms if they appear disproportionately in this topic compared to other topics. This makes it possible to depict particularly characteristic orientations of the topics in the individual years. By distinguishing between global and annual top terms, both a classification into the global topic structure and an identification of temporary shifts are possible. This is marked with an arrow in the topic title (Figure 2).
To make it easier to interpret the topics, so-called labels , i.e. topic titles, are created by the PsychTopics team. For this purpose, top terms and evolution terms as well as the most representative publications per topic are examined. Based on a comparison with metadata from the PSYNDEX database, it is checked which classification categories are most frequently present in the publications on the topics ( https://www.psyndex.de/ueber/contente-bau/schlagwoerter-classifications/#classificationschemata ). The example topic on trauma disorders in refugee children was often indexed with the category on neuroses and anxiety disorders . Assignment to other disorders and to the category of social processes and structures was equally common . For methodological reasons, the algorithm in its current version assumes that the number of topics is the same in every year. If there are changes in the content of the topic over the years, for example if a topic loses relevance and a new topic has emerged, this will be marked with an arrow in the labels. The evolution terms are again helpful for this.
The topics can have different narrow or broad content and range, for example, from psychological science in general to the much more specific neural basis of emotions. What remains crucial for the algorithm is which words are frequently used together in the publications. The topics can sometimes be similar or only differ in nuances. For example, the topic of “psychometrics” had, on the one hand, the focus on “personality measurement” and, on the other hand, the focus on “clinical practice”. The development of topics over the years makes it possible to examine the specifics of similar topics in more detail.
_____________________________________________________
Structure of PsychTopics and example applications
_____________________________________________________
Figure 3 shows the homepage of PsychTopics. Green boxes provide explanations. The gray boxes show data. The dark blue menu on the left offers several options for exploring topics: a detailed view ( Browse Topics ) – the most frequently addressed topics per year ( Popular by Year ) – the topics with the largest increase or decrease in central publications ( Hot/Cold ) as well as the list of evolution terms across the publication years ( Topic Evolution ). The last menu item, Methods, describes technical details and links to further literature.
Figure 3:
Screenshot of the PsychTopics homepage.
General information and usage instructions can be found in the green boxes. The gray boxes show the preliminary topics for the current year as well as the most frequently addressed topics overall.
One possible use of PsychTopics is to find out about current trends in specialist literature. The menu item Hot/Cold shows three topics with the strongest rising and the most falling trend (Figure 4). The strongest trends in each case are listed in the tables above. This shows that between 2019 and 2021, psychoanalysis ? COVID-19 was the hot topic. As of 2020, the topic moved from a psychoanalytic approach to a focus on Corona, and many more posts were published on the topic. Corona has also found its way into the topic of Training Settings ? Police , while the more general hot topic Theories of Psychology & Psychotherapy has remained more constant in terms of content. The conclusion, which is certainly not surprising, is that psychological research has increasingly addressed the coronavirus pandemic and its psychosocial effects in recent years.
This can now be viewed in more detail using the Search PSYNDEX link. To do this, a new window will open in the PubPsych search portal. The literature search is made up of the evolution terms of the topic.
In addition to exploring emerging or resurgent topics, PsychTopics invites an overview of the diversity of research in psychology. This makes it possible to determine to what extent topics of social relevance are covered in psychological publications. A corresponding topic in PsychTopics is Psychology & Society , which will increasingly focus on climate change from 2019 onwards. The link to the free literature search in PSYNDEX is still useful, for example to find teaching material for students. PsychTopics also lists the three specialist journals in which the most publications have been made on the topics. This makes it easier for young scientists to find journals that are suitable for their contributions. The proportion of empirical studies in the publications on the topic is also displayed. This makes it clear which topics could be suitable for research syntheses, as there may be a lot of primary data available for a summary analysis (meta-analysis). Particularly for hot topics with very busy publication activity, implementation on a platform such as PsychOpen CAMA (Burgard et al., 2022) is important in order to keep the meta-analytic evidence up to date. In contrast, a low proportion of empirical publications indicate that they tend to deal with theoretical topics or research desiderata.
Figure 4:
Hot/Cold view of PsychTopics (detail).
The tables below list all topics with a significantly rising trend (“Hot”) or a falling trend (“Cold”). The annual number of publications of central importance on the individual topics is shown in the diagrams above.
____________________________________________________
Automated tools are useful for exploration, but they also have their limitations.
_____________________________________________________
The strength of a tool that uses machine learning to find topics in large amounts of text lies in exploration and exploration. It invites you to browse through the variety of topics and specialist literature. The underlying topic model is intended to promote the tendency to react sensitively to new topics without neglecting previous topics. PsychTopics is also suitable for generating hypotheses. The appearance of the word “Facebook” in the topic of addiction may indicate problematic effects of using social media.
The usefulness of an exploration tool like PsychTopics obviously has its limits: the common occurrence of words in publications and their combination into topics does not constitute evidence of a causal connection. For this purpose, targeted literature searches remain the gold standard. Nor should a direct conclusion be drawn about the importance or academic performance of sub-disciplines of psychology based solely on the temporal trend of a topic. The topics are never the same and in many cases cross-disciplinary. Therefore, conclusions from the results of PsychTopics should be drawn carefully and, if necessary, with the addition of further data and considerations.
The focus of PsychTopics is currently on specialist publications from German-speaking countries. The expansion to include international data sets is technically unproblematic and would be an important addition in times of international networking. Since publications in specialist publications are subject to a natural delay (due to peer review and journal publication intervals), preprints would be a way to identify topics more quickly. Conference programs provide information about which publications can be expected in the near future. In principle, these can be evaluated using text analysis in the same way as specialist articles. Since a large part of the communication and discussion in the professional community takes place digitally, integrating “Twitter mining” to identify psychological hot topics (Bittermann et al., 2021) into PsychTopics would be worthwhile. By supplementing specialist literature with conference content and Twitter posts, the insight into the current process of communication within the psychology community would be even more comprehensive and immediate. This stands for the future developments of PsychTopics.
literature
Bittermann, A., Batzdorfer, V., Müller, SM, & Steinmetz, H. (2021). Mining Twitter to detect hotspots in psychology. Journal of Psychology, 229 (1), 3–14. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000437
Bittermann, A. & Klos, EM (2019). Is psychological research permeable to current social issues? A scientometric analysis using the example of flight and migration using topic modeling. Psychological Review, 70 (4), 239–249. https://doi.org/10.1026/0033-3042/a000426
Blei, DM, Ng, AY & Jordan, MI (2003). Latent Dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning Research , 3, 993–1022. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/944919.944937
Bornmann, L., Haunschild, R. & Mutz, R. (2021). Growth rates of modern science: a latent piecewise growth curve approach to model publication numbers from established and new literature databases. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 8, 224. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00903-w
Burgard, T, Bosnjak, M, Studtrucker, R. (2022). PsychOpen CAMA: Publication of community-augmented meta-analyses in psychology. Research Synthesis Methods, 13 (1), 134-143. https://doi.org/10.1002/jrsm.1536
Chang, W., Cheng, J., Allaire, JJ, Sievert, C., Schloerke, B., Xie, Y., … & Borges, B. (2021). shiny: Web Application Framework for R. R package version 1.7.1. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shiny
Devlin, J., Chang, MW, Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2019). BERT: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies , 4171-4186, Minneapolis, MN, USA. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/N19-1423
Feldman, R. (2013). Techniques and applications for sentiment analysis. Communications of the ACM, 56 (4), 82-89. https://www.doi.org/10.1145/2436256.2436274
Muenchen, RA (2019, May 28). The Popularity of Data Science Software [Blog post]. Available at https://r4stats.com/articles/popularity/
Nunez-Mir, GC, Iannone, BV, Curtis, K., & Fei, S. (2015). Evaluating the evolution of forest restoration research in a changing world: a “big literature” review. New Forests, 46(5), 669-682. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11056-015-9503-7
Pennebaker, JW, Booth, RJ, & Francis, ME (2007). Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count: LIWC [Computer software]. Austin, TX: LIWC.net
Rieger, J., Jentsch, C., & Rahnenführer, J. (2021). RollingLDA: An Update Algorithm of Latent Dirichlet Allocation to Construct Consistent Time Series from Textual Data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021 (2337-2347). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.201
Rieger, J., Rahnenführer, J. and Jentsch, C. (2020). Improving Latent Dirichlet Allocation: On Reliability of the Novel Method LDAPrototype. In Natural Language Processing and Information Systems, NLDB 2020 . LNCS 12089 (118-125).
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51310-8_11
Science Council. (2018). Perspectives on psychology in Germany . Available at https://www.forschungsrat.de/download/archiv/6825-18.pdf
football
The world’s largest online platform for football statistics is launching in Germany
FootyStats is the world’s largest online football statistics platform with over one million visitors per month. It covers data from over 1,500 football leagues around the world, including the Premier League, Bundesliga and UEFA Champions League. The online platform is now publishing a German-language version.
The platform provides comprehensive data for football match predictions. It shows stats per team, per league and even head-to-head comparisons. Additionally, users can view data such as expected goals, average goals, corners, and goal timing for free.
Calculating and generating over 300 match data ensures team stats, form and league standings are accurate and up to date. Compared to other data platforms, the statistics are updated immediately within ten minutes after the game ends.
Currently, FootyStats provides key football statistics in CSV forms and plans to launch an API (in JSON/XML format) in the coming months. Shot and possession data will also be available later.
FootyStats is offered in multiple languages: English, Swedish, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, Turkish, Korean, Japanese and now German.
To make it convenient and easy for users to stay up to date from anywhere, FootyStats has made their app available on the App Store and Google Play.
OpenPassword
Forum and news
for the information industry
in German-speaking countries
New editions of Open Password appear three times a week.
If you would like to subscribe to the email service free of charge, please register at www.password-online.de.
The current edition of Open Password can be accessed immediately after it appears on the web. www.password-online.de/archiv. This also applies to all previously published editions.
International Cooperation Partner:
Outsell (London)
Business Industry Information Association/BIIA (Hong Kong)
Open Password Archive – Publications
OPEN PASSWORD ARCHIVE
DATA JOURNALISM
Handelsblatt’s Digital Reach