Dear WHAT-IF enthusiasts,

welcome to our first newsletter! You have every right to be confused: 1) yes, we have a new design! And 2) as members of the WHAT-IF team, you were automatically subscribed to this first issue. Thank you for being here (and please don’t unsubscribe)!

This newsletter serves as a platform to share updates, announce upcoming events and publications, and keep everyone in the loop. It’s intended for project members, stakeholders, and anyone interested in our work. We’ll send it out to subscribers and publish it on our website every three months.

Here’s what has happened since our kick-off meeting:

Launching our new design!

Our communications team has been re-designing our visual design together with the graphic design studio Positive Impact Design. Their expertise has helped us develop a cohesive and appealing visual language that can be easily used and that draws inspiration from the core idea of dynamic conditions—a world modelled through machines and responsive systems. Check out our new website!

Networks, ABMs and LLMs in Konstanz

Last week, several WHAT-IF work package team members have met in Konstanz to discuss the core of our WHAT-IF machine. The two-day workshop brought together the teams by David Garcia and Annie Waldherr (WP4) as well as colleagues from WP5 (experiments) and WP3 (data). Find a short summary of their discussions on simulations, networks and large language models on our website.

Flexible solutions for cross-platform research

Accessing data from social media platforms remains a major obstacle for researchers studying digital media, especially cross-platform and cross-national data. WHAT-IF team members Andreu Casas, Andreu Rodilla, Nienke Visscher, Kasper Welbers & Wouter van Atteveldt have been working on adapting a data donation tool to collect user data across five platforms and four countries in order to map how people engage with digital media in their everyday lives.

Because of the heterogeneity of data structures, they had to build a flexible system that allows to detect structural variation between donations and platforms and that will optimize the data collection process. Read more about this system in the blog post here!

A 5-minute introduction to WHAT-IF? Here we go!

Andreu Rodilla gave a talk introducing the WHAT-IF project at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – find the full video here on our blog and forward it to others!

Call to action: please share!

Please forward this newsletter to your team members or colleagues interested in our project.

Conference season has started! Let us know if there is anything coming up.