About

DataMine Europe uses data science to analyse European politics. We explore the potential of open-source programming languages for social science research. DataMine Europe ASBL is a non-profit organisation registered in Belgium, Brussels (ASBL, ‘Association Sans But Lucratif’).

1. Analysing the European elections, May 2019

DataMine Europe was founded in June 2018 as European Elections Stats (short ee_stats). ee_stats provided regular automated seat projections for the European parliament elections in May 2019.  All the underlying data was published in an Open Data Hub and our data was used by leading media such as CNBC, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, El País, France Culture, Euractiv, Die Tageszeitung, Tagesspiegel, n-tv, Hürriyet Daily News and other public and private organisations.

2. DataMine Europe, 2019 and beyond

After the European elections 2019, we decided to found the non-profit DataMine Europe ASBL  –  EuropeanElectionsStats.eu became DataMineEurope.eu. In November 2019 we published a large scale media text mining analysis, based on over 240.000 media headlines from 25 leading newspapers in the 6 most powerful EU countries. We also continue to provide a seat projection for the European Parliament based on national polls as a continuous indicator of the European political mood beyond the European Parliament election cycle.

As DataMine Europe, our vision is to build a collection of innovative analyses and tools, by combining data science and social sciences.

More analyses elsewhere: DataMine Europe is not our full-time job and additional analyses will be published via different channels. We have, for example, recently created a big dataset of 148.000 European laws for the think tank Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). More analyses will follow.

Our tools:
We are mostly using the programming language R and Python for data collection, cleaning, analysis and visualization. For earlier visualisations, we used TableauPublic a free software for creating interactive charts and maps.

By Camille Borrett and Moritz Laurer , two young professionals in Brussels. Please email us if you have questions, feedback, criticism or if you have ideas for cooperation.