A team of students from the Institute of Social Sciences won the runner-up award in the "Technical Excellence" category at the Hertie School's data4good Festival in Berlin. Their project, "North Rhine-WestFEARia," impressed the jury with its innovative data analysis in the service of the common good.

A total of 80 bachelor's students in 16 teams from 11 European countries competed in this year's hackathon. The participants, most of whom came from computer and data sciences, supplemented by a few social scientists, worked on two different data sets with a focus on socially relevant issues.

Carlotta Steimke, Charlotte Keyßler and Michel Janssen devoted themselves to the Bertelsmann Foundation's ReligionMonitor – a survey on religion and social cohesion – and developed an ambitious research project based on it. Under the title "North Rhine-WestFEARia – Perceived Threats in Population and State Parliaments," the students investigated the extent to which threats perceived by the population are also addressed in the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia.

The methodological strength of the project lay in the combination of different data sources: the students analysed state parliament speeches using a zero-shot BERT classifier and combined these findings with the survey data from the ReligionMonitor. In doing so, they created a new, merged data set that systematically links these two perspectives – population perception and parliamentary communication – for the first time.

In addition to the "Technical Excellence" category, prizes were also awarded in the areas of "Data Storytelling" and "Social Impact" at the data4good Festival. The festival highlights the growing importance of data-driven approaches to social challenges and promotes interdisciplinary exchange among young scientists in Europe.