CS6724 Comp Social Science

The Hostile Audience: The Effect of Access to Broadband Internet on Partisan Affect by Lelkes, Sood, and Iyengar. The data behind this research covers from 2004 to 2008. But there are recent changes stemming from the government and ISP laws could be coming due to the recent attacks on Net Neutrality. These changes could quickly […]

“Predicting Sales from the Language of Product Descriptions” by Reid Pryzant, Young-joo Chung, and Dan Jurafsky “Do Online Reviews Affect Product Sales? The Role of Reviewer Characteristics and Temporal Effects” by Nan Hu, Ling Liu, and Jie Jennifer Zhang Both papers here are focused on how corporations are increasingly using social science to better connect […]

“Algorithmically Bypassing Censorship on Sina Weibo with Nondeterministic Homophone Substitutions” by Chaya Hiruncharoenvate et al. “Reverse-Engineering Censorship in China: Randomized Experimentation and Participant Observation” by Gary King et al. It seems obvious that as long as massive and automatic censorship is possible to the censor without incurring any major cost, then the censor will remain […]

“A 61-million-person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization” by Bond et al. reports on the effects that political mobilization messages on social media have on elections and personal expression. There were 61 million in the social message group, but 600 thousand for the other groups? I see that their methods are fairly sound in […]

“Linguistic Harbingers of Betrayal: A Case Study on an Online Strategy Game” by Nucuale et al investigates how language can be used to predict future interactions and choices of users within an online game. I wonder if these results can go beyond online games to in-person and normal interactions between friends? I think that there […]

“Language from Police Body Camera Footage shows Racial Disparities in Officer Respect” by Voigt et al investigates almost exactly what the title describes. I am surprised they mention cases of conflict between communities and their police forces only in the midwest and east coast states, but then go on to study the police force in […]

“Exposure to Ideologically Diverse News and Opinion on Facebook” by Bakshy, Messing and Adamic is exploring how social media sites like Facebook give political information to users and how it affects their political perspective. This research shows the influence that social media can have on polarizing opinions on certain topics. Since social media algorithms are […]

“The Promise and Peril of Real-Time Corrections to Political Misperceptions” Garrett and Weeks are finding ways to respond to inaccurate political claims online. “A Parsimonious Language Model of Social Media Credibility Across Disparate Events” Mitra, Wright, and Gilbert are using language analysis to predict the credibility of Twitter posts. Garrett and Weeks rightfully point out […]

Title: Antisocial Behavior in Online Discussion Communities.  Cheng et al. are exploring the dynamics of large online communities with members behaving undesirably. The authors only looked into three news websites to learn about antisocial behavior. While each site has their own target audience to set it apart, there may be little other variation among them. […]

The Language that Gets People to Give: Phrases that Predict Success on Kickstarter Mitra and Gilbert are investigating how and why certain crowd funding projects succeed or fail. One of the first interesting points I found were what metrics of a project were targeted for analysis. Mitra and Gilbert look specifically at accurately predicting project […]