Published:
In this paper, we use activity traces to try to cluster users based on their behavior in an online genealogy wiki. We treat the wiki as a community of practice, and based on legitimate peripheral participation theories we expect that people will start in peripheral roles before moving to more central roles.
Published:
As a guest lecture in Seungyoon Lee’s seminar on Social Network Analysis I presented an overview and brief tutorial RSiena and actor-oriented network models more broadly.
Published:
I presented some of my research from my master’s thesis about how people change between roles in the genealogy community WeRelate. I also spoke about some of the benefits of using a shared, open source family tree for genealogy collaboration.
Published:
Large peer production projects, such as Wikipedia and open source software, work surprisingly well in creating useful, large scale, and high quality artifacts. However, the vast majority of peer production projects fail to gain contributors or contributions. Because network scholars have focused on the rare successful projects, there is very little research on the factors that predict project growth in the first place. We approach this question by examining the network structures and participation dynamics of a diverse population of peer production communities as they are just starting.
Published:
I taught a lecture on digital exhaust and surveillance as part of the Computing Everywhere course run by Jeremy Birnholtz. I tried to combine a semi-technical explanation of how surveillance happens online with social theory (e.g., Lessig’s pathetic dot theory).
Published:
Both work groups and nascent peer production projects are composed of a small group of people, engaged in collaborative sense-making and knowledge production. The work group literature has found that dense, non-hierarchical interaction structures are associated with productive groups. Based on these findings, we hypothesize that these same structures would also lead to more productivity from new peer production communities. However, an analysis of 2,555 wiki communities shows that early interaction structures have very little impact on eventual productivity (as measured by total edits) or community growth (as measured by total contributors). Rather, a quickly growing group of active editors is a much better predictor of growth than the structure of interactions between them.
Published:
Presented the same work at ASA and got some great feedback that helped us move it in a more organization-centric direction.
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I was a peripheral participant on the project but was lucky enough to get to present it at CTS.
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I presented a new version of our work again at OCMC, now working around the idea of predicting productivity rather than growth and got some great feedback from org comm scholars.
Published:
This was my second experience teaching for the Computing Everywhere course run by Jeremy Birnholtz. Following feedback from students after my last lecture I made this lecture much more technical.
Published:
Abstract: Why do people start new online communities? Previous research has studied what helps communities to grow and what motivates contributors, but the reasons that people create new communities in the first place remain unclear. We present the results of a survey of over 300 founders of new communities on the online wiki hosting site Wikia.com. We analyze the motivations and goals of wiki creators, finding that founders have diverse reasons for starting wikis and diverse ways of defining their success. Many founders see their communities as occupying narrow topics, and neither seek nor expect a large group of contributors. We also find that founders with differing goals approach community building differently. We argue that community platform designers can create interfaces that support the diverse goals of founders more effectively.
Published:
Abstract: Online peer production projects, such as Wikipedia and open-source software, have become important producers of cultural and technological goods. While much research has been done on the way that large existing projects work, little is known about how projects get started or who starts them. Nor is it clear how much influence founders have on the future trajectory of a community. We measure the behavior and social networks of 60,959 users on Wikia.com over a two month period. We compare the activity, local network positions, and global network positions of future founders and non-founders. We then explore the relationship between these measures and the relative growth of a founder’s wikis. We suggest hypotheses for future research based on this exploratory analysis.
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We were part of a great panel on agent-based modeling in communication research. Our work takes an interesting HCI-based model of community joining (Resnick et al., 2011) and tests what assumptions must be added in order for simulated agents to have similar outcomes as empirical communities.
Published:
I presented very similar work to the International Conference on Computational Social Science. I had some great conversations and feedback, and thought of some good new directions to take this research and publish it.
Undergraduate course, instructor of record, Purdue University, 2012
Taught presentational speaking to undergraduates.
Undergraduate course, TA, Purdue University, 2013
Teaching assistant and recitation instructor for class about the role of emerging technology.
Undergraduate course, instructor of record, Purdue University, 2014
Worked with Lorraine Kisselburgh and Bart Collins to create a new course. We developed the syllabus together and then I taught the course.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2020
I taught our Communication and Social Networks course. I drew a lot from a version of the course taught by Seungyoon Lee, but added an R programming component. The class was disrupted by COVID-19 and moved online halfway through but the students were resilient and amazing.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2020
I built heavily on Tommy Guy’s course run at the University of Washington to develop a course that introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. The course includes programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests. The course was taught during both Spring 2020 and an intense four-week summer course
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2020
I taught our Communication and Social Networks course. I have continued to evolve how I teach the R component. I have started teaching ggraph and tidygraph. I think it’s a little bit more accessible than igraph, and also introduces tidyverse syntax. I also re-organized the course so that one day a week is more theoretical and one day is more technical/lab-based. This class was all online, but we made it work! :)
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2020
I developed a course designed to teach both the technical skills to explore and extract insight from data and the communication skills to visualize, present, and discuss data insights. The course focused most on learning R, and particularly creating compelling visualizations in R, rather than statistical procedures. The syllabus is available here. For the visualization aspects, I drew heavily on Andrew Heiss’s course on Data Visualization in R.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2021
I continued to teach my intro to programming course for graduate students, in both Summer 2021 and Fall 2021. The course introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. We go over programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2021
I taught our Communication and Social Networks course. I have continued to evolve how I teach the R component. I have started teaching ggraph and tidygraph. I think it’s a little bit more accessible than igraph, and also introduces tidyverse syntax. I also re-organized the course so that one day a week is more theoretical and one day is more technical/lab-based.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2022
I taught our methods course for undergraduates — Quantitative Methods for Communication.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2022
I continued to teach my intro to programming course for graduate students, Fall 2022. The course introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. We go over programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2022
I again taught my Communication and Social Networks course.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2022
I again taught my Communication and Social Networks course.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2023
I taught our methods course for undergraduates — Quantitative Methods for Communication.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2023
I continued to teach my intro to programming course. The course introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. We go over programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, and basic statistical tests.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2023
I again taught my Communication and Social Networks course.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2024
I again taught my Communication and Social Networks course.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2024
I co-taught the first version of a course offered by The Methodology Center at Purdue (MCAP). The goal of the course was to teach a broad, interdisciplinary understanding of scientific methods. We invited guest speakers each week to discuss a topic they were expert in, and then had a seminar-style discussion of the topic the following class session.
Graduate course, Purdue University, 2024
I continued to teach my intro to programming course. The course introduces basics of Python programming and data science to social science graduate students. We go over programming principles like control flow and functions, and then introduce parts of the data science pipeline, including APIs, pandas, visualization, computational text analyses, and statistical testing.
Undergraduate course, Purdue University, 2024
I am teaching Communication and Social Networks, now with a brand-new fancy website.