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And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Olof Sundin and Anna-Lena Godhe, whose interest is in the impact of generative AI on information-seeking and learning in Swedish schools. This is based on a series of focus groups with school teachers and librarians on how they experience the impact of generative AI on their own practices, with nine such focus groups already completed.

Searching for and evaluating information sources has played a crucial role in Swedish curricula for many decades; learning through projects has been a typical education style here, and this usually …

The next speakers at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Joachim Griesbaum, Karen Malin Krüger, and Anna Mierzecka, whose interest is in information-literate human behaviour in AI interactions. Information literacy is defined as an individual’s ability to deal with information effectively and ethically; AI makes such engagement easier, but also partially takes over the process of selecting, evaluating, and presenting information – assessing the quality of that information, however, becomes a great deal more complicated.

By now, several AI literacy frameworks have already been proposed; how these relate to the core elements of information literacy is still poorly understood …

The post-lunch session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg starts with a paper by Thao Laavunen, who begins by noting the changing information sourcing practices from traditional business information sources via search engines to new digital and AI-enhanced sources today. This provides immediate access to substantial information quantities, new opportunities to identify markets and solve problems, and greater decision-making independence in business.

But greater access to information isn’t equal to better decision-making: the evaluation of the quality and relevance of sources is still critical, of course, and information overload, credibility uncertainties, algorithmic and commercial shaping of information provision, and …

And the final speakers in this session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg are Corinna Hertweck and Giovanni Astante, whose focus is on voting in Switzerland’s frequent referenda. How do Google’s and Bing’s AI Overviews perform in such contexts?

Referenda happen at all levels of Swiss democracy, with approximately four such votes (sometimes on several issues) happen per annum, and are surrounded by lively public debate. Information retrieved from AI Overviews might play a significant role in influencing voters’ decision-making processes; importantly, too, such votes are binary yes/no choices, which makes them different from conventional election decisions.

How often …

And the next speaker at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg is Patrick Parschan, presenting a paper that some of of my colleagues have also had a little input into. The focus here is on what sources are present in AI search results on information relating to elections; the focus here is especially on a number of recent German state elections.

Google and Bing have of course recently rolled out AI-generated search summaries, which have displaced the conventional organic search results; how such summaries are produced remains largely opaque at this point. This produces new risks: search is already a …

The first paper session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg that I’m attending is on search engines and political information, and starts with Íris Damião, whose focus is on political bias in search engines and Large Language Models. Search engines have evolved a lot since they emerged in the 1990s, of course, but continue to be very widely trusted by their users – even when searching for some very sensitive information.

This is the case for instance when searching for election information, where people also search for information on election procedures, party programmes, and even whom to vote for …

Another week, another conference: I’ve made my way to the SEASON (Search Engines and Society Network) 2026 conference in Hamburg, which is now in ist second year, and we start with a keynote by Thomas Höppner, who brings a legal perspective to the question of search engines and their role in society. Search engines serve as gatekeepers to information, and therefore have a key role to play in democracy: information is the currency and lifeblood of democracy (and indeed today is the International Day of Democracy, as it turns out).

So, if information is the currency of democracy, then the …

And the final speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Claudia Thoms, who will present a semantic analysis of party competition in Germany. She begins by noting that political competition is also a competition over language, with parties trying to establish a distinct political profile. Issue emphases and positioning leave races in language, while strategic framing also shapes political perception itself.

Different parties want to associate themselves with different issues, to emphasise their competence on these issues; this also responds to ebbs and flows in public attention to specific issues. But issue relevance does not …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Jose David Ortega Chávez, who shifts our focus to Colombia, and specifically to the peace narratives in the speeches of its four last presidents. The interest here is in which actors these narratives highlight, what political functions the narratives serve, and what view of the nation they construct.

This draws on the strategic narratives framework, which are understood as meaning-making devices employed by political actors. Their point is to influence the behaviour of others. This project gathered some 7,400 speeches from the four presidents, from both …

The next speaker in this session at the ECREA 2026 conference in Brno is Guillem Lloret i Triola, whose focus is on the analysis of metaphors in the Catalan electoral campaign of 2021. This builds on a complete corpus of speeches during the campaign, which took place after the annulled independence referendum and the exiling of pro-independence political leaders. This marked the end of the independence cycle, also against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The analysis of the speeches during the election builds on critical discourse analysis and critical metaphor analysis, and translates this to political communication in the …