Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts: Elena Callegari and Hulda Þórisdóttir

Elena Callegari, CDHA/HÍ, and Hulda Þórisdóttir, HÍ, will give a talk in the Centre for Digital Humanities and Arts lecture series. The lecture is called What Were Icelanders Really Voting On? Public Discourse as a Complex System

The talk will be held in Oddi 206 on October 20, from 12:00 to 13.00. All are welcome, and please do bring lunch!

In the MSHL lecture series, experts from various fields of digital humanities present their research in short and accessible talks.

The talk will also be streamed on the Centre's YouTube channel.

Click here to see the schedule and abstracts of the talk series.

About the talk

How does a public debate become polarized? Not through one speech, one headline, or one misleading claim, but through hundreds of small acts of repetition, reframing, omission and response.

This talk approaches public discourse as a complex system: a network in which local interactions can produce large-scale patterns that no single actor controls. Meanings shift as messages travel. Some frames become self-reinforcing; others disappear. Over time, different groups may no longer simply disagree about the answer: they may be responding to different versions of the question.

The recent Icelandic EU referendum provides a striking case. Why did ideas of independence and sovereignty gain such traction, while other seemingly plausible frames, such as security, barely surfaced? How did competing interpretations of what the referendum itself meant become established?

The talk asks what complexity science can add to the study of language, media and political communication, and what it might reveal about how public realities are built.