Computational Methods and Nationalism Studies

From Trump’s election campaign on X (Twitter) to the mobilizations of independence movements on Facebook, many nationalist phenomena have developed an important digital aspect. While the digitalisation of nationalism has provided nationalism researchers with an unprecedented amount of digital information, the massive volume of these data often makes many traditional research methods infeasible. Against this background, computational methods offer viable options to analyse a large volume of data in an efficient way. In this article, I will offer a brief summary of works that employed computational social science methods for the study of nationalism and give an account of what computational social science methods can contribute to nationalism studies. I will end this article with a discussion of the best practices for computational nationalism research.