Seminars

  • Platform-controlled social media APIs threaten open science

    Date: 4 March 2024 Time: 3-4PM Venue: Informatics 1.16 / Zoom Authors/Speakers: Emily Goldwin and Darja Wischerath Social media data hold tremendous value for studying behavioural patterns over time and across contexts at individual, group and population levels, and are relevant to a broad range of disciplines in the social and behavioural sciences. Researchers can mainly access these data via platform-provided…

  • LocalView: Scaling Up the Study of Local Politics and Policy-Making in the United States

    Date: 5 February 2024 Time: 3-4PM Venue: Informatics 1.16 / Zoom Authors/Speakers: Soubkhik Barari Despite the fundamental importance of American local governments for services like education and public health, local policy-making remains difficult to study at scale due to a lack of centralized data. In this talk, I introduce LocalView, the largest existing dataset of real-time local government public…

  • Ideological Polarization on Social Media Date: 20 November 2023 Time: 3:10PM Venue: Informatics 1.15 / Zoom Authors/Speakers: Marilena Hohmann (Speaker), Karel Devriendt, Michele Coscia Abstract/Information: Despite a multitude of studies of polarization on social media, it remains disputed whether polarization in digital public spaces is on the rise. To analyze ideological polarization – increased ideological…

  • A Human-centric Approach to Researching Social Bias in NLP Technologies Date: 6 November 2023 Time: 3:10pm-4:15pm Venue: Informatics Forum 1.15 Authors/Speakers: Eddie Ungless Abstract: Much current research into social bias in Natural Language Processing – that is, the tendency for NLP technologies to reflect human biases such as sexism – suffers from a superficial understanding of…

  • Computing hearts and minds: The implications of using modern quantitative social science for public communication campaigns Date: 23 October 2023 Time: 3:00 PM UTC Venue: Informatics Forum 1.15 & Zoom Author/Speaker: Ben Tappin Public communication campaigns are increasingly using the methods of quantitative social science to achieve their goals. In this talk I will consider some implications of…

  • CAN NEIGHBOURHOOD INDICATORS DERIVED FROM NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING OF LOCAL NEWSPAPER TEXT HELP US UNDERSTAND POPULATION HEALTH RESILIENCE AND VULNERABILITY? Date: 9 October 2023 Time: 3:00 PM UTC Venue: TBA Speaker: Eleojo Abubakar It is of great interest to understand why some neighbourhoods experience markedly better, or worse, health outcomes than might be expected given the local…