Nikos Fokas (Hungary–Greece 2018) is a Professor of Sociology, and Head of MTA-ELTE-Peripato Research Group. He was a visiting professor at University of Athens, Postgraduate program of Sociology and Political Sciences. He was the Director of the Research Institute of Greeks in Hungary. His research fields include: Dynamics of Public Discourse in Mass Media, Complex Social Networks, Comparison of Political and Social Development of Greece and Hungary,
Topic: Order, tension and the problem of forecasting in the reality of mass media
The present research intends to reconstruct empirically how the Greek mass media depicted the “debt crises” and the “refugee problem” during 2015-2017. I endeavour to reconstruct the concepts of “crises” and “refugee problem” as a network of words denote that these words appeared simultaneously in a given article. I’m strongly believe that these networks of words play a crucial role in predictions of some characteristics patterns of the next stages of the text. The topology of these complex words’ networks, the stability or volatility of network’s ties could serve as a frame for the intended predictions. My basic research hypothesis is that during 2015 before and after the period of June-July 2015, the flow of debt crisis narrative in a special manner at least theoretically, could be predictable from the corpus of the previous periods. According to my estimation, during the period June-July 2015 the process entered in unstable phase so the future has become unpredictable. I will research to find the characteristic features of network evolution, and those network attributions which are strongly related with the predictability of near future within a reality of mass media.
