Diaries of Social Data Research

In this episode, we speak to Christian Baden, Christian Pipal, and Mariken van der Velden about their 2022 journal paper in Communications Methods and Measures, titled, “Three Gaps in Computational Text Analysis Methods for Social Sciences: A Research Agenda”. They co-authored this paper with Martijn Schoonvelde, and the authors span several disciplines, from communication to political science. We...

Our guests on this episode are Diyi Yang, assistant professor at the School of Interactive Computing, and David Muchlinski, assistant professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, both at Georgia Tech. We discuss their EMNLP 2021 paper, "Latent Hatred: A Benchmark for Understanding Implicit Hate Speech." This paper is co-authored with Mai ElSherief, Caleb Ziems, Vaishnavi Anupindi, Jo...

This episode features Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of English at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and David Bamman, an associate professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. We discuss their 2018 Cultural Analytics paper co-authored with literary studies PhD student Sabrina Lee, titled “The Transformation of Gender in English-Lang...

Our guests in this episode are Ryan Gallagher, a PhD Candidate in Network Science at Northeastern University, and Brooke Foucault Welles, an Associate Professor in Communication Studies and the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. We discuss their 2019 CSCW paper, "Reclaiming Stigmatized Narratives: The Networked Disclosure Landscape of #MeToo" with co-authors Elizabeth Stowell an...

This episode features Dora Demszky, a PhD student in Linguistics at Stanford University. Dora works at the intersection of natural language processing and education. We discuss her ACL 2021 paper titled "Measuring Conversational Uptake: A Case Study on Student-Teacher Interactions", co-authored with Jing Liu, Zid Mancenido, Julie Cohen, Heather Hill, Dan Jurafsky, and Tatsunori Hashimoto. Dora's w...

Our guest in this episode is Deen Freelon, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina in the School of Journalism and Media. We chat about his 2020 Social Science Computer Review Paper "Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation" with co-authors Michael Bossetta, Chris Wells, Josephine Lukito, Yiping Xia, and Kirsten Adams. Deen also talks a...

In this episode, we talk with David Lazer, the University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences at Northeastern University and the Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. We discuss two seminal papers in computational social science he co-authored a decade apart: "Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science" (Science 2009) and &n...

Our guests on this episode are Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, and Sarah Shugars, a Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Center for Data Science. We discuss the process behind their EMNLP 2021 paper, “(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys,” co-authored with Ryan Gallagher,...

Our guests on this episode are Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, who was a computer science postdoc at Stanford and now a senior research scientist at Google, and Camilla Griffiths, who is a postdoc at Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). With Hang Su, Prateek Verma, Nelson Morgan, Jennifer Eberhardt, and Dan Jurafsky, they are co-authors on a TACL 2018 paper, "Detecting In...

This episode features Aaron Schein, a computer scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. We discuss his WWW 2021 paper "Assessing the Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Turnout in the 2018 US Midterm Elections", co-authored with Keyon Vafa, Dhanya Sridhar, Victor Veitch, Jeffery Quinn, James Moffet, David Blei, and Donald Green. Aaron shares with us how he collaborated with ind...

In this episode, we talk with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling. Justine is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Arthur is a Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. We discuss their 2017 EMNLP paper, with Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, "Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse." Justine and Arthur touch on how coll...

Our guest on this episode is Emaad Manzoor, an Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Along with George H. Chen, Dokyun Lee, and Michael D. Smith, he wrote "Influence via Ethos: On the Persuasive Power of Reputation in Deliberation Online" which is currently under review at Management Science. Emaad illuminates this project's long journ...

This unique episode centers on a "meta" discussion on interdisciplinary work involving large-scale social data. We interview Chris Bail, a Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at Duke University. Last year, Chris and co-authors Achim Edelman, Tom Wolff, and Danielle Montagne published an overview paper titled "Computational Social Science and Sociology" in the Annual Review of Sociology. We di...

This episode features Maria Antoniak, a PhD student, and Karen Levy, an assistant professor, who are both in the Department of Information Science at Cornell. Maria, who has a background in computational linguistics, and Karen, who has a background in law and sociology, are co-authors, along with David Mimno, on the CSCW 2019 paper "Narrative Paths and Negotiation of Power in Birth Stories". We di...

Our guests in this episode are Brendan O'Connor, Associate Professor of Computer Science at UMass Amherst, and Brandon Stewart, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Princeton University. We talk with them about their 2013 ACL paper (with co-author Noah Smith) “Learning to Extract International Relations from Political Context” which presents a probabilistic model for extracting events between count...

In this episode, we talked to Stevie Chancellor, who is the lead author on a 2019 CHI paper titled "Discovering Alternative Treatments for Opioid Use Recovery in Social Media". Along with Stevie, who is a computer scientist, the team of authors included clinical psychologist and addiction researcher George Nitzburg, Stevie’s advisor Munmun De Choudhury, and two undergraduate students, Andrea Hu an...

We discuss the paper "Mobility network models of COVID-19 explain inequities and inform reopening" with first author and Stanford computer science PhD student Serina Chang. This paper's team of interdisciplinary authors include other computer scientists (Emma Pierson, Pang Wei Koh, and Jure Leskovec), sociologists (Beth Redbird and David Grusky), and an epidemiologist (Jaline Gerardin). Serina sha...

In this episode, we talk to Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches public policy, communication, and information. We discuss his paper "Digital Health Communication and Global Public Influence: A Study of the Ebola Epidemic" which was published in the Journal of Health Communication in 2017. His co-authors on this paper include technical a...

We talk with Emma Pierson, PhD in Computer Science from Stanford and incoming assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech, about her paper "Daily, weekly, seasonal and menstrual cycles in women’s mood, behaviour and vital signs" published in Nature Human Behavior, 2021. This was joint work with fellow computer scientists (Tim Althoff and Jure Leskovec), head of data science at a partne...

This episode features two guests: Lauren Klein, an associate professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, and Sandeep Soni, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Their Cultural Analytics paper, "Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Lan­guage Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers", was published earlier this year in 2021, with an additional co...