Specific Humor Scandal Database

This dataset is developed for the CELSA research project 'Humour and Conflict in the Public Sphere: Communication styles, humour controversies and contested freedoms in contemporary Europe'. The project sets out to conduct an interdisciplinary analysis of the interrelatedness between digital humor and social conflict.

The dataset contains data for 550 items of digitally mediated humor (e.g. online memes, cartoons, video's, posts) created in the context of specific cases of socio-political conflict in four European countries (i.e. Belgium, Belarus, Estonia and Poland). The dataset offers coding of linguistic markers such as genre, humor mechanisms and communication style as well as a mapping of the discourse which the humorous items spark on social media. Here, comments made as a reactions to the humor on social media platforms are coded for types of response (e.g. positive, negative, humorous, non-humorous) as well as the incidence of meta-comments (comments on comments) and other linguistic metrics for analysis (e.g. types of speech used in audience reactions).

The data was coded indepentently by four researchers with a background in each respective country in 2023-2024.

This dataset can be used, for example, to analyse audience reception of digitally mediated humor, or allow the (cross-national) analysis of the impact of different humoristic genres in digital public spheres.