CDSC PhD Application Info Session and Q & A – October 18

CDSC group retreat at Purdue, 2024

Thinking about applying to graduate school? Wonder what it’s like to pursue a PhD? Interested in understanding relationships between technology and society? Curious about how to do research on online communities like Reddit, Wikipedia, or GNU/Linux? The Community Data Science Collective is hosting a virtual Q&A session on October 18th at 12 pm PT, 2pm CT, 3pm ET for prospective students. This session is scheduled for an hour, to be divided between a larger group session with faculty and then smaller groups with current graduate students. If you would like to attend, register at this link!

This post provides a very brief run-down on the CDSC, the different universities and Ph.D. programs our faculty members are affiliated with, and some general ideas about what we’re looking for when we review Ph.D. applications.

What is the Community Data Science Collective?

The Community Data Science Collective (or CDSC) is a joint research group of (mostly quantitative) empirical social scientists and designers pursuing research about the organization of online communities, peer production, and learning and collaboration in social computing systems. We are based at Northwestern University, the University of WashingtonThe University of Texas at AustinPurdue University, and a few other places. You can read more about us and our work on our research group blog and on the collective’s website/wiki.

What are these different Ph.D. programs? Why would I choose one over the other?

This year the group includes four faculty principal investigators (PIs) who are actively recruiting PhD students: Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University), Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington in Seattle), Nathan TeBlunthuis (University of Texas at Austin) and Jeremy Foote (Purdue University). Each of these PIs advise Ph.D. students in Ph.D. programs at their respective universities. Our programs are each described below.

Although we often work together on research and serve as co-advisors to students in each others’ projects, each faculty person has specific areas of expertise and interests. The reasons you might choose to apply to one Ph.D. program or to work with a specific faculty member could include factors like your previous training, career goals, and the alignment of your specific research interests with our respective skills.

At the same time, a great thing about the CDSC is that we all collaborate and regularly co-advise students across our respective campuses, so the choice to apply to or attend one program does not prevent you from accessing the expertise of our whole group. But please keep in mind that our different Ph.D. programs have different application deadlines, requirements, and procedures!

Faculty who are actively recruiting this year

If you are interested in applying to any of the programs, we strongly encourage you to reach out the specific faculty in that program before submitting an application.

Jeremy Foote

Jeremy Foote is an Assistant Professor at the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University. He is affiliated with the Organizational Communication and Media, Technology, and Society programs. Jeremy’s research focuses on how individuals decide when and in what ways to contribute to online communities, how communities change the people who participate in them, and how both of those processes can help us to understand which things become popular and influential. He and his students use multiple methods, including data science, agent-based modeling, field experiments, and interviews.

Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. He is also adjunct faculty at UW’s Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE)Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and Information School. Although many of Mako’s students are in the Department of Communication, he has also advised students in all three other departments—although he typically has more limited ability to admit students into those programs on his own and usually does so with a co-advisor in those departments. Mako’s research focuses on population-level studies of peer production projects, computational social science, efforts to democratize data science, and informal learning. Mako has also put together a webpage for prospective graduate students with some useful links and information..

Aaron Shaw, Nikki Ritcher Photography

Aaron Shaw is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern. In terms of Ph.D. programs, Aaron’s primary affiliations are with the Media, Technology and Society (MTS) and the Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) Ph.D. programs (please note: the TSB program is a joint degree between Communication and Computer Science). Aaron also has a courtesy appointment in the Sociology Department at Northwestern, but he has not directly supervised any Ph.D. advisees in that department (yet). Aaron’s current projects focus on comparative analysis of the organization of peer production communities and social computing projects, participation inequalities in online communities, and collaborative organizing in pursuit of public goods.

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Ventrait Pictures

Nathan TeBlunthuis is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin in the area of social informatics. Nathan’s research focuses on analyzing ecosystems of online communities, AI tools in peer production, and methods in computational social science. His current projects continue in these areas and also draw from them all to understand how information sources achieve legitimacy in online communities. He works primarily using computational tools and big data, but also grounds his work in qualitative evidence.

What do you look for in Ph.D. applicants?

There’s no easy or singular answer to this. In general, we look for curious, intelligent people driven to develop original research projects that advance scientific and practical understanding of topics that intersect with any of our collective research interests.

To get an idea of the interests and experiences present in the group, read our respective bios and CVs (follow the links above to our personal websites). Specific skills that we and our students tend to use on a regular basis include consuming and producing social science and/or social computing (human-computer interaction) research; applied statistics and statistical computing, various empirical research methods, social theory and cultural studies, and more.

Formal qualifications that speak to similar skills and show up in your resume, transcripts, or work history are great, but we are much more interested in your capacity to learn, think, write, analyze, and/or code effectively than in your credentials, test scores, grades, or previous affiliations. It’s graduate school and we do not expect you to show up knowing how to do all the things already.

Intellectual creativity, persistence, and a willingness to acquire new skills and problem-solve matter a lot. We think doctoral education is less about executing tasks that someone else hands you and more about learning how to identify a new, important problem; develop an appropriate approach to solving it; and explain all of the above and why it matters so that other people can learn from you in the future. Evidence that you can or at least want to do these things is critical. Indications that you can also play well with others and would make a generous, friendly colleague are really important too.

All of this is to say, we do not have any one trait or skill set we look for in prospective students. We strive to be inclusive along every possible dimension. Each person who has joined our group has contributed unique skills and experiences as well as their own personal interests. We want our future students and colleagues to do the same.

Now what?

Still not sure whether or how your interests might fit with the group? Still have questions? Still reading and just don’t want to stop? Follow the links above for more information. Feel free to send at least one of us an email. We are happy to try to answer your questions and always eager to chat. You can also register for and join our Q+A session on October 18 at 2:00pm CT.

Symposium on Online Community Research at Purdue

On September 13th, the Community Data Science Collective led the “Frontiers in Online Community Research Symposium” at Purdue University. We had a number of fantastic presenters and panelists discussing topics from moderating the Fediverse to the role of LLMs in online communities and how different academic disciplines approach online community research. 

Eshwar Chandrashekharan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) joined as our keynote speaker. He presented research he and his group have been working on titled, “Proactive Approaches to Promote Community Resilience and Foster Desirable Behavior Online”. Eshwar discussed ongoing efforts to combat undesirable online behaviors through research and design that promote resilience and facilitate positive interactions within online conversations and communities.

Prior to Eshwar’s keynote, we had an opening panel and research presentations by CDSC members. For the opening panel, Purdue professors Diana Zulli (Communication) and Marcus Mann (Sociology) joined CDSC faculty Aaron Shaw (Northwestern), and Mako Hill (University of Washington) for an introductory Q&A panel. The panel discussed what we know about online communities, what new questions we are just starting to answer, and what exciting new methods are being used.

Following the panel, CDSC students Carl Colglazier (Northwestern), Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern), and Kaylea Champion (University of Washington) gave really wonderful talks on their research. Carl talked about his work on moderation in the Fediverse, and the impact of site-level blocking. Sohyeon provided a number of provocations about community governance in the face of AI-driven changes, while Kaylea discussed her work on underproduction in social systems. They all gave fantastic presentations and inspired great conversations among attendees.

Overall, it was an excellent symposium that we hope helps to push our field forward. Thank you to all who attended and made it such a great event. A special thank you to the CDSC Purdue members for organizing the event and to Thatiany Andrade Nunes for taking photos!

CDSC Welcomes Dionna, Loizos, and Thaty!

We’re excited to welcome Dionna Taylor, Loizos Bitsikokos, and Thaty (pronounced Tatchi) Andrade Nunes as new core student members of CDSC!

Dionna is a first year MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of Washington, being advised by Mako. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Communication (also from UW) and is interested in the intersection of human behavior and technology, with a primary focus on online community collapse and online healthcare spaces. In her free time, you can find her reading, line dancing, or traveling.

Loizos is a PhD student at Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication. His academic journey began with degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), followed by an MA in computational social science from the University of Chicago, focusing on sociology. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, online platforms, and organizations. He’s particularly interested in the intricate relationship between algorithms and society. He also studies the tensions between structure and agency within online platforms, examining how platforms influence identity formation and whether users can resist institutionally ingrained biases. His work investigates the conceptualization of desire within platform infrastructures. When he has free time outside of academia, Loizos enjoys writing poems, making and collecting zines, watching cinema, taking photographs, walking in nature, and occasionally playing the saxophone.

Thaty (pronounced like Tatchi) is a first-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Aaron Shaw. Her interest in studying online communities began while working at game companies in South Korea. In addition to creating social media videos, she was responsible for organizing engaging community events and managing online communities. She was fascinated by how quickly these communities could self-organize, whether by creating guides, wikis, or establishing their own rules and moderation systems. Thaty wants to investigate how communication and information technologies influence social outcomes, how online communities influence participants, what kind of participants (lurkers or active) join them, and why and how they contribute. She’s also interested in the different forms of community engagement such as collaboration, political mobilization, and organization. She’s originally from Brazil, lived in South Korea for seven years, and speaks Portuguese, English, Korean, and some Spanish! In her free time, she enjoys playing story-driven video games, watching horror movies/series, and spending time with friends

Professor Floor Fiers!

Dr. Floor Fiers and proud faculty mentor Aaron Shaw.
Floor and Aaron just before Northwestern’s doctoral hooding ceremony.

A very special congratulations to CDSC member Floor Fiers on the completion of their Ph.D. in Media, Technology & Society at Northwestern!

Floor’s dissertation Chasing the Ideal and Making It Work: Pursuing Employment in the Remote Gig Economy, seeks to understand inequality among workers in the gig economy and how they navigate the precarity involved in remote gig work. Several of the chapters have already appeared as standalone, peer-reviewed publications, but there’s plenty of new, exciting, and as-yet-unpublished material in there as well.

This week (!), Floor will begin a position as Assistant Professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam.

Since I (Aaron) am posting this one myself, it seems appropriate to add that it’s been wonderful working with Floor over the past five+ years. Indeed, I’m still in denial about the fact that Floor won’t be physically present in our lab meetings this year. At the same time, I couldn’t be happier for Floor and definitely get a goofy, proud-faculty-mentor grin on my face whenever I think about the incredible things they’ve accomplished already (nevermind all the cool stuff yet to come).

Congratulations again, Floor!

Come See Us at FOSSY!

Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?

Join us next weekend at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. We’re excited to have a number of awesome presenters speaking about their work. Check out the schedule below:

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

Collaborations between practitioners and researchers can be transformative! Let’s get to know each other.

Tickets are still available at every price tier, check them out here.

We hope to see you there!

Academic Year-in-review (2023-2024) and celebration!

CDSC group photo from Fall, 2023 at Northwestern
CDSC group photo taken at Northwestern in Fall, 2023

We love celebrating the accomplishments of CDSC lab and community members! Here’s a less-than-complete, not-quite-brief summary of some of those accomplishments over the past academic year+ (since the last time we wrote a post like this). Congratulations to everyone involved—including those members of the CDSC community not named below. It truly takes a village to do all of these things and we appreciate the achievements and contributions of all.

Awards, degrees, and fellowships:

  • Hazel Chiu received a Top Paper Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) Communication and Technology (CaT) Division for “User Acceptance of Multiple Accounts Management on SNS: A Technology Acceptance Model Perspective.”
  • Nathan TeBlunthuis received a Top Paper Award from the ICA Computational Methods (CM) Division for “Misclassification in Automated Content Analysis Causes Bias in Regression. Can We Fix It? Yes We Can!.”
  • Dyuti Jha and Ryan Funkhouser were named runners-up for the National Communication Association (NCA) Sam Keltner Top Student paper for “Freedom to flourish: A systematic review of the literature at the intersection of resilience, communication, and peacebuilding.”
  • Floor Fiers completed their Ph.D. and will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Amsterdam.
  • Nathan TeBlunthuis will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Texas, Austin.
  • Tommy Rousse completed his J.D. and MTS Ph.D. at Northwestern.
  • Sohyeon Hwang will begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Information Technology & Policy (CITP) at Princeton University in the Fall.
  • Yibin Fan completed a Master’s degree in Communication at the University of Washington.
  • Benjamin Mako Hill was a fellow at CITP at Princeton University during 2023-2024.
  • Emily Zou graduated with honors from Northwestern in American Studies with her thesis, “`Did Bro Just Grief the US Government?’: How online community identities create new genres of political communication.” Starting in the Fall, Emily will begin a Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University.
  • Carolyn Zou graduated with honors from Northwestern in Communication Studies with their thesis, “Sociotechnical Risks of Simulating Humans with Language Model Agents.” Starting in the Fall, Carolyn will begin a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University.
  • Carolyn Zou was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).

Publications:

Members of the lab published more than 15 papers and articles. This is too many to list here, but you should check our publications page for more.

Talks and conference presentations:

Members of the group gave way too many presentations to list.

Select venues include: Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL); Free and Open Source Software Yearly Conference (FOSSY); PyCon; Wikimania; the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA); the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (NCA); the ACM Conferences CSCW and CHI; the Yale Internet & Society Project; the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Stanford University HCI Speaker Series; University of Maryland, College Park; Rutgers University; Cornell Tech, Digital Life Institute; Learning Planet Institute, Paris; the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication; The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy; and the Stanford Trust & Safety Research Conference, the IEEE International Conferences on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) and Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER).

Teaching:

A selection of the courses taught or TA’ed by members of the group in the past year include:

  • Introduction to Communication
  • Introduction to Programming and Data Science
  • Public speaking
  • Online communities
  • History & theories of information
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Communication technology & politics

Many of these are available via our workshops and classes page.

Events:

Members of the group planned, hosted, or otherwise played leadership roles in the following events:

  • The CDSC Science of Community Dialogues Series
  • The Northwestern Center for HCI+Design Thought-Leader Dialogue Series
  • Free Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) Conference, Science of Community Track (2023 and 2024).
  • The Decentralized Social Media Workshop, Princeton University
  • Hongerige Wolf Festival (“Science” branch)

Other career and degree milestones:

  • Madison Deyo joined the group as Program Coordinator!
  • Molly de Blanc began a Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern.
  • Haomin Lin and Matt Gaughan joined the CDSC at UW and Northwestern respectively.
  • Carl Colglazier, Ryan Funkhouser, and Zarine Kharazian passed their general/preliminary/qualifying exams.
  • Charlie Kiene completed an internship at Amazon.

Meet us at FOSSY!

The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is less than a month away and we will be there!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. Check out the full schedule here.

We’re excited to have a number of really amazing speakers presenting their work. Check out the list below:

Kaylea and Matt will be presenting again!

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

We hope to see you at FOSSY. Even if you can’t make it to our sessions, we’ll be at the conference so stop by and say hello!

FOSSY 2024: Submission Deadline Extended!

Worried you didn’t submit your FOSSY proposal on time? Well fear not, the deadline has been extended to Tuesday, June 18th. Submit your proposal today!

Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) this summer!

We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS. 

FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.

Recording of Thought-leader dialogue: Decentralizing social media

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a “Thought leader dialogue” panel on “Decentralizing Social Media” co-hosted by the Northwestern Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D) and the Community Data Science Collective.

The (extraordinary!) panelists were Jaz-Michael King (IFTAS), Christine Lemmer-Webber (Spritely Institute), and Bryan Newbold (BlueSky). The discussion ranged far and wide over some key background on decentralized and federated social media as well as some urgent challenges and opportunities in the space.

The recording of the session is up and you can watch it here (or in the frame below).

Thanks to the panelists, Madison Deyo, and the HCI+D team for making this happen!

Book Review: The Conversational Firm

New hires from the rank-and-file arguing with the CEO in public. Employee-chosen projects and a management team reluctant to say no. Few if any written rules. No offices. Staff arriving and departing when they choose. Messes everywhere. Some companies—especially technology firms—describe their ways of working as remaking the model of the modern business. They describe ways of working that were unthinkable some years ago. But has anything really changed from the organization models of the past, or are these features mostly hype and marketing obscuring the same old bureaucracy and hierarchy?

Although not a Communication scholar, sociologist Catherine J. Turco’s work offers vital insight into how communication structures are reordering relationships, with significant implications for the field and discipline of Communication. In this brief and readable ethnographic study, Turco describes ‘TechCo,’ a social media marketing company, in rich detail. TechCo employees have access to the perks and features familiar to those who study firms in Silicon Valley — hack nights, freedom to experiment, flexible schedules, an open floor plan, a “dogs welcome” policy, free beer, and so on. The company seeks to embody its own industry: positioning itself as open, freewheeling, and engaged, just like the social media platforms they help their customers to use. Beyond this external branding, the founders have made an explicit goal internally: to create a company that is intentionally more `open’ and less hierarchical than traditional firms. How is this goal accomplished—and is it indeed accomplished at all?

Turco’s answer to this question is that these companies accomplish half of this goal. Companies are indeed able to deliberately open their communication, including the disclosure of financial details that in many firms is held exclusively by C-level leadership, as well as allowing for frank, public feedback from rank and file staff to executive leadership. However, they do so while leaving their hierarchical structure for decisionmaking largely intact. Turco argues that staff are satisfied by this arrangement—and in fact prefer to have decisionmaking power left in the hands of executives.

Drawing from theoretical background stretching from Max Weber to Albert Hirschmann to Sherry Turkle, Turco elaborates a theory of the conversational firm. In the conversational firm, voice and decision making power are intentionally decoupled. Therefore, these two factors can be analyzed distinctly and in tension with one another. This poses a particular challenge to lines of research which treat voice and authority as intertwined or interchangeable.

Communication scholars may find much to reflect on in her careful articulation of what is meant by and accomplished by the idea of “openness” in a firm, from her exploration of how employee use of social media can both benefit and harm a firm, and her case study of how efforts to brand and disseminate company culture can be both a marketing boon and an internal headache.

The book opens with conversations with the founders of TechCo and their desire for “radical openness” (p. 2) and anti-bureaucratic approach to structure. Turco describes the company’s experiences with openness and anti-bureaucratic tendencies from a range of perspectives: as reflected in the experiences of an eager young woman who is new to the workforce, as observed in Hack Nights, as visible within the company’s rollicking wiki discussions about everything from financial information to kitchen cleanup duties, and in their grappling with a lack of strict policies (instead, TechCo asks employees to “Use Good Judgment'”).

Through the first three chapters, Turco asks what this openness means, and finds that although the founders’ goal is to be transparent and less hierarchical than traditional firms, hierarchy remains and is even desired by employees: instead, what’s truly different about TechCo is its embrace of employee perspectives, and the employees’ trust that the firm will take them into account. Through long-running discussions on the company wiki and chat platforms, town hall meetings and cross-departmental dinners, we see frank conversations unfold and influence the direction of the company. Turco also observes that employees seem to primarily seek to be heard—they don’t have, and often don’t want, decision rights: they want and receive voice rights.

Turco concludes that despite the findings of prior work that bureaucracy is largely indestructible and reproduces itself, openness in communication allows greater freedom for employees, at least bending the bars of what Weber called the iron cage. The book returns to the limitations of anti-bureaucratic approaches throughout the text, with a series of examples in Chapter Six navigating the limitations of this openness: how the company came to have a traditional human resources department despite the founders’ repeated public expressions of distate for formal HR and concerns about noise, mess, and distraction in open ‘officeless’ seating plans.

In chapter four, Turco turns attention away from TechCo’s internal dialog and to the relationship between TechCo and external audiences—in particular, the absence of a social media policy. Unlike other firms which have strict rules for how employees comport themselves on social media—and the risk that the company faces from public response to employee behavior and disclosures—here again TechCo emphasizes their “Use Good Judgment” guideline. When employees make mistakes that reflect poorly on the company, TechCo’s response is to treat this as a learning opportunity, turning the event into training materials to shape employee understanding of what good judgment looks like (and doesn’t look like).

Chapter five offers a case study of TechCo’s external communication about their company culture. The founders disseminated a `manifesto’ that combined both their beliefs about TechCo’s culture and their beliefs about how companies should be organized to succeed in the current era. Although the document received extensive positive attention and served as a recruiting tool, existing employees were troubled by gaps between their experience and the company’s description of its culture. Employees also voiced the irony of a document developed in a top-down way describing a participatory and bottom-up culture. Satisfaction plummets. Over time, however, continuing conversation about the document and making revisions to it seems to allow employees to regain their sense of voice, eventually resolving the crisis.

Published in 2016 from fieldwork that ended in 2013, this account does not allow us to see how the conversational firm fared during recent events that have disrupted the structure, functioning, and culture of organizations—e.g. the isolation of Covid-19 pandemic, the migration to remote work, and questions about returning to the office.

In elaborating a theory of how firms can be conversational, decoupling decisionmaking power and voice, the book offers a useful framework for scholars examining the future of work and organizations, as well as other topics of enduring interest in Communication: the shifting relationship between firms and publics and the continued blurring of the public and the private in social media. Of key interest is the extent to which Communication theories about voice, the constitutive power of communication, and factors such as concertive control can be applied to these organizations.

Graduate students with an interest in ethnographic methods will find particular value in the blunt personal narratives that comprise an extended methodological appendix. Turco describes the process of gaining access to the company, gathering observations and interview data, and iteratively analyzing her notes and memos, all of which will be familiar to many. However, this section is unique in offering a series of self-critical reflections on the work of organizational ethnography, explicit description of the personal toll the work exacted from her, and the sometimes painful experience of receiving feedback from her subjects as the analysis emerged.

Ultimately, Turco argues that embracing open communication in firms is a transformative way forward. While we in Communication may agree, what remains for us is to investigate what it means: for how we understand voice in organizations and how we assess the role of technology and platforms for communication.