Few hours to go. Tonight, 21:00 CEST, Wiener Stadthalle, Vienna. The 70th Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final is upon us. Over the last two weeks I've been writing about this contest from every angle I could — the lyrics, the fun stats, the network analysis, and the streaming numbers. All of it built on the data infrastructure I've been developing with my co-authors Alessia Morrone, Barbara Będowska-Sójka, Sabrina Giordano, and Claudia Tarantola. A lot has changed since I pub

The Eurovision 2026 Grand Final is in five days — Saturday 16 May, 21:00 CEST, live from the Wiener Stadthalle in Vienna. Thirty-five countries; twenty-five spots in the final; one crystal microphone. So who wins? Last year I closed the pre-final piece with a simple line: let's keep our spreadsheets on one side and our hearts on the other. This year I'm doing the same — but the spreadsheets are bigger. With my co-authors Alessia Morrone, Barbara Będowska-Sójka, Sabrina Giorda

After the lyrics analysis and the fun stats post, I wanted to try one more angle on Eurovision 2026 before Saturday's Grand Final. This time: a network. In the academic work I've been doing with my co-authors Alessia Morrone, Barbara Będowska-Sójka, Sabrina Giordano, and Claudia Tarantola, we use network analysis to study how countries vote for each other in Eurovision — who has voting alliances, who's culturally close, who sits on the periphery. That work is at the country l

So Eurovision 2026 is upon us — the 70th edition, hosted by Vienna for the third time in the contest's history (after 1967 and 2015). After last week's post on what the 2026 lyrics tell us, I went back into the data with a different question: what are the strangest, most surprising numbers behind this year's contest? Some come from the lyrics dataset I built with Alessia Morrone, Barbara Będowska-Sójka, Sabrina Giordano, and Claudia Tarantola. Others come from the bookmakers,