Research fellow and doctoral researcher
University of Bielefeld · SOEP-RegioHub · BGHS · Computational Social Science
Konstantin Wandel is a research fellow at the University of Bielefeld, working at LeibnizCampus / SOEP-RegioHub / DIW, and a doctoral researcher at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology (BGHS).
His dissertation asks which modality carries the meaning in short-form video, and what follows for measurement once researchers code such material at scale. A second strand of his work builds the data infrastructure of SOEP-RegioHub: semantic search over survey and regional metadata, verified links into the portals that hold the data, and reproducible access paths for regionalized analysis. Earlier and continuing work covers regional inequality, panel analysis of household processes, and political language in large parliamentary corpora.
Multimodal Measurement of Short-Form Video. Four papers in argument order, from everyday communication to the political case. The instrument is validated on the more manifest everyday constructs first and taken to the latent political domain afterwards, which has the side benefit that the political round doubles as coder training.
| Paper | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| P1 | Modality ablation on a corpus of everyday short-form video, with a literature-grounded codebook and a purpose-built annotation app | Active, coding |
| P2 | A typology of modality designs and a reporting standard for multimodal coding | Conceptual |
| P3 | Model inference under a budget: cost curves, capacity checks, and a small language for describing coding designs | Follows the gold standard |
| P4 | Political stress test: modality ablation on PoliTok-DE, the hardest and most latent constructs | Held as the deep test |
Binary scales contrasting meritocracy with recognition of social closure are intuitively appealing but empirically weak. Evidence from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) suggests that these attributions are often orthogonal.
Panel-based analysis of vegetarian and vegan dietary transitions, household composition, and intra-household diffusion dynamics using SOEP data. With S. Kühne and K. Ostermann.
A directed study of reprinting between regional newspapers: which title carries another title’s text, how quickly, and along which lines. Same-day syndication dominates, flows follow size rather than wealth, ownership forms the backbone of the network, and local reporting stays siloed while national material travels. Only derived aggregates leave the licensed corpus.
Embedding-based analysis of political language, topic structures, rurality, regional imaginaries, and semantic movement in large parliamentary corpora. With L. Gawenda.
Analysis of how spatial and regional inequalities are framed in British parliamentary discourse over three decades. With Z. Chen and L. Gawenda.
Infrastructure and research work around regionalized SOEP analyses, geospatial social science, metadata discovery, and reproducible data access.
Search and retrieval infrastructure for regionalized datasets, variable metadata, codebooks, and linked research documentation. The two finders below run on it, and both index descriptions only.
Semantic search over the descriptions of German georeferenced data: more than 12,000 indicators, tables and datasets from over 30 official sources, with filters over spatial level (municipality, district–NUTS3, NUTS2), theme, and year. Each hit links out to the portal that holds the data, wherever the portal allows it at the level of the single indicator or table. Descriptions are indexed, the data itself stays with its provider.
Multilingual semantic search over the official SOEP-Core v41 variable metadata: 125,496 variables with bilingual labels, topic paths, and the question wording where it exists. A multilingual bi-encoder with a cross-encoder reranker surfaces canonical analysis-ready variables that keyword search tends to bury under chattier subsample items.
Retrieval over German parliamentary debates (GermaParl) built on dense vector embeddings, for semantic search across large collections of political speech. Supports research into semantic drift, topic modelling, and regional political imaginaries.
Prototype, access on request.
| Period | Role | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 2025–present | Research fellow and doctoral researcher | University of Bielefeld / SOEP-RegioHub / BGHS |
| 2023–2024 | M.A. Politics, Administration & International Relations | Zeppelin University |
| 2018–2022 | B.A. Sociology, Politics and Economics | Zeppelin University |