SPELL is reaching the end of its first year.

During the last months, many things have been achieved: the website is up and running, the requirements and the research design are defined and development of the platform is under way.

The last year was one of many questions, methods, meetings and translation between different disciplines. It is indeed the case that sometimes International Relations and Computer Science are using a different language – but that is where the exciting part starts!

Prior to our analysis of small European states’ discourse on the Internet, of how their diplomatic discourse is disseminated and by whom it is received, we have to identify those voices worth listening to. After all, digital diplomacy does not talk only through one microphone…

It belongs to the phase one of our research project, WP1, where we aim at creating the map of online diplomatic activity of small EU member states – a kind of “listening exercise”…

SPELL has delivered D1.2 – Research Design.

This is where the project shifts from wonder to inquiry; the research design outlines:

• how we will track the digital presence of small European countries on X/Twitter
• what indicators we will analyze
• how platform data will link with interpretative analysis

The frequency of posting, level of engagement, sentiments conveyed, strategic narratives deployed, informational impact and digital visibility: all of these produce an indicator. However, what do such indicators tell us about how small countries attempt to make themselves visible, audible, and comprehensible digitally?

This design offers us a framework with which to address such questions systematically, but still allow for some space to account for surprises in digital diplomacy.

D1.1 of the SPELL project has been done – SPELL’s Tool Requirements.

And what would happen if the field of International Relations met Computer Science? Could “strategic narrative” be turned into a variable? Could diplomatic communication be classified, analyzed, visualized without distorting its content?

This was one of the motivations behind our first work on requirements. The outcome is a common vision for the SPELL platform that links digital diplomacy research with NLP, sentiment analysis, topic extraction, and social graph analysis.

In a nutshell – political scientists came up with the questions; computer scientists with the architecture and somewhere between the concepts, the code, and the coffee, the SPELL platform started to formulate.

SPELL has its online home.

The website is launched, and it will serve to provide project updates, events, publications, and other information as the research develops. It shall be used by researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and anyone else who wishes to accompany us on our explorations of the world of digital diplomacy.

Surely an digital diplomacy project needed an “online “digital home”; here it is!

SPELL has officially started!

During the next three years, our group will investigate the way small European countries utilize social media as instruments of diplomacy – the content of their diplomatic communications and reactions of the public to such content.

Combining approaches from International Relations, Computer Science, NLP – LLMs, and some daring spreadsheets, SPELL is the starting point of our interdisciplinary study of digital diplomacy.

Let’s get started!