Eating Together, Eating Alike
With Simon Kühne and Kerstin Ostermann, I look at how vegetarian and vegan diets spread within households and how long they last, using the German Socio-Economic Panel. A working paper is in progress.
About
Hi, I’m Konstantin. I am a research fellow in the Social Data Science group at Bielefeld University and at the Leibniz ScienceCampus SOEP-RegioHub, a joint project of Bielefeld University and DIW Berlin. Since September 2026 I am also a doctoral researcher in sociology at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS).
In my dissertation I study short-form video: which parts of a clip carry its meaning (the picture, the sound or the words), and what this means for researchers who want to code such videos at scale. At SOEP-RegioHub I build search tools that help people find survey and regional data. Besides that, I work on content sharing in the German regional press, on how diets spread within households, and on political language in parliament.
If any of this is close to your own work, I would be glad to hear from you.
Research Interests
- Computational social science
- Multimodal measurement, video as data
- Measurement validity, codebooks and annotation design
- Political sociology
- Regional inequality and social mobility
- The German regional press and news syndication
- SOEP-based panel analysis
- Geospatial social science
- NLP, embeddings, semantic drift
- Generative media and consensus reality
- Institutional trust and algorithmic mediation
Dissertation
My dissertation has the working title Short-Form Video as Data for the Social Sciences: Validated Multimodal Measurement of Online Communication. I started it at the BGHS in September 2026, and Simon Kühne supervises it.
It consists of four papers. I begin with everyday videos, where most things are easier to measure, and then move on to political content.
| Paper | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | Which modality carries which construct in everyday short-form video | In progress |
| P2 | A typology and reporting standard for multimodal coding, with S. Kühne | Conceptual |
| P3 | Model choice and annotation budgets | Planned |
| P4 | The same questions for political short-form video | Planned |
Projects
Academic projects
Content Sharing in the German Regional Press
Many German regional newspapers print the same articles. I trace which titles share text with which, and how ownership, size and geography shape these flows. The newspaper texts are licensed, so only aggregated results leave the corpus. Two manuscripts are in preparation.
Semantic Drift in Parliamentary Speech
Together with Leon Gawenda, I use text embeddings to follow how political language, and the way politicians speak about places, changes over time in parliamentary speech.
Who speaks for the left-behind? Framing of spatial inequalities in the House of Commons (1988–2019)
With Chen Zeng and Leon Gawenda, I look at how British MPs speak about regional inequality in the House of Commons over three decades.
SOEP-RegioHub projects
GeoLAB
At SOEP-RegioHub I work on GeoLAB, which supports regional analyses with the SOEP: finding regional data, linking it to the survey, and keeping the way to the data reproducible.
Metadata search
The search behind GeoDB and the SOEP Variable Finder. It indexes the descriptions of datasets and variables, and the data themselves stay with the institutions that publish them.
Tools
GeoDB
GeoDB, short for GeoDataBase, lets you search German regional data from statistical offices and other public sources, by spatial level, theme and year. Each result takes you to the portal that holds the data.
SOEP Variable Finder
Search the SOEP-Core variables in German or English, with their labels, topics and question wording.
Parliamentary Speech Finder
Search Bundestag speeches since 1949 (GermaParl) by topic. You get the original speeches, ranked by how close they are to your query, and no generated summaries.
badata
An R package with regional labour-market data from the German Federal Employment Agency, by district and occupational group. I am one of its authors, together with H. Long Nguyen and Dorian Tsolak.
Talks
- Video, Images and Text as Data: Navigating a New Frontier. LSC Research Retreat, Leibniz ScienceCampus SOEP-RegioHub, Bielefeld, 6–7 October 2026 (upcoming).
- Who Speaks for the Left-Behind? Framing of Spatial Inequalities in the House of Commons (1988–2019). Beyond the Divide: ECR Conference on the Political Dimensions of Place-Based Inequalities in Urban and Rural Life, London School of Economics, 23–24 April 2026. With C. Zeng and L. Gawenda; presented by L. Gawenda.
- The Return of Geography? Comparing the Politicisation of Space in the British Parliament and the German Bundestag since WWII. GermaParl-Workshop 2026, NRW School of Governance, University of Duisburg-Essen, 16–17 April 2026. With L. Gawenda.
CV
The table gives the short version. My full academic CV is available as a PDF (2 pages).
| Period | Role | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 2026–present | Doctoral researcher in sociology | Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS) |
| 2025–present | Research fellow | University of Bielefeld / SOEP-RegioHub |
| 2024–2025 | Research assistant | RITZ Regional Innovation and Technology Transfer Centre |
| 2023–2024 | Student research assistant | Center for Political Communication, Zeppelin University |
| 2023–2024 | M.A. Politics, Administration & International Relations | Zeppelin University |
| 2018–2023 | B.A. Sociology, Politics and Economics | Zeppelin University |
Contact
Email is the best way to reach me.
- Email: konstantin.wandel@uni-bielefeld.de
- GitHub: github.com/konstantinwandel
- ORCID: 0009-0007-3321-7774
- University profile: PEVZ Konstantin Wandel