Introducing the Cannabis Data Science Collective

In 2012, Washington State became one of the first two US states to legalize cannabis for non-medical use. Since then, sales tax revenues from the “green economy” have flooded state coffers. Washington’s academic institutions have been elevated by that rising tide. The University of Washington (one of our research group’s two institutional homes) is now home to pot-focused grants from UW’s Center for Cannabis Research and the UW Law School’s Cannabis Law and Policy Project.

Today, our research group — formerly known as the “Community Data Science Collective” — announces that we too will be raiding that pantry to satisfy our own munchies.  Toward that end, we have changed our name to the Cannabis Data Science Collective. We’ll still be the CDSC, but we’re changing our logo to match our new focus.

Our research will leverage our existing expertise in studying the chronic challenges faced by online communities, peer production, and social computing. We plan to blaze ahead on this path to greener pastures.

Although we’re still in the early days of this new research focus, our group has started a work on series of projects related to cannabis, communication, and social computing. The preliminary titles below are a bit half-baked, but will give you a whiff of what’s to come:

• Altered state: Mobile device usage on public university campuses before and after marijuana legalization
• A tale of two edibles: Automated polysemy detection and the stevia/sativa controversy
• Best buds: Online friendship formation and recreational drug use
• Bing bong: The effect of legalization on Microsoft’s search results
• Blunt truths: The effect of the joint probability distribution on community participation
• Dank memes: The role of viral social media in marijuana legalization
• Decision trees: The role of deliberation in governance of a marijuana sub-Reddit
• The Effects of cannabis on word usage: An analysis of Wikipedia articles pre/post pot legalization
• Fully baked: Evidence of the importance of completing institutionalized socialization practices from an online cannabis community
• Ganja rep: A novel approach to managing identity on the World Weed Web
• Hashtags: Bottom-up organization of the marijuana-focused Internet public sphere
• Higher calling: Marijuana use and altruistic behavior online
• Joint custody: Overcoming territoriality with shared ownership of work products in a collaborative cannabis community
• Pass the piece: Hardware design and social exchange norms in synchronous marijuana-sharing communities
• Pipe dreams: Fan fiction and the imagined futures of the marijuana legalization movement
• Sticky icky: Keeping order with pinned messages on an online marijuana discussion board
• Turn on, tune in, drop out: Wikipedia participation rates following marijuana legalization
• Weed and Wikipedia: Marijuana legalization and public goods participation
• World Weed Web: A look at the global conversation before and after half of the United States decriminalized

We planned to post this announcement about three weeks ago but our efforts were blunted by a series of events outside our control. We figured it was high time to make the announcement today!