This study is for American Twitter users with iPhones / Android smartphones. We would like to invite you to participate in an exciting research study about “Experiments with social media use.” If you stay committed to the research study over four weeks AND complete two short surveys, you will earn a $25 Amazon gift card.If... Continue Reading →
The SMOL Project
Image credits: Swati Vats for the SMOL project. The Social Media, Online behavior and Language project focuses on online human behavior and computer mediated communication. SMOL is also internet lingo for something that's small and cute. Founding member and PI: Dr. Kokil Jaidka, Assistant Professor, NUS Research Areas: The role of affordances in computer-mediated communication:... Continue Reading →
Reviews on my recent paper: “Talking politics: Building and validating data-driven lexica to measure political discussion quality”
I'm going to do something I've never done before and post all the reviews of my CCR paper here in this blogpost, as a memorial to the paper, the hours I spent on it, as well as all those hours the reviewers spent writing down their deepest (and sometimes darkest thoughts). Here's the final version... Continue Reading →
How to issue unique coupon codes to your Qualtrics participants
Wow ever pick up a basic idea that has no documentation whatsoever? That happened to me last night and has been the best and the worst refresher of JavaScripts I've had. Here's what I wanted to do: Given a list of coupon codes, print a unique coupon code once a respondent completes a survey. Sounds... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on Instagram
Image courtesy Georgia de Lotz on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/rncny1536Xs Excerpts from something written for VICE Is it accurate to say that Instagram has completely shifted its focus to video? In what ways has it done that? Instagram has led the charge where it comes to photo based social media. Rather than further innovating in the image... Continue Reading →
Resources for writing a top AI / NLP for CSS paper
Helpful hacks for computational social science scholars and the AI for Social Impact track of major AI conferences It's always been important, but now it is increasingly common for computational social science researchers to contextualize their work in the broader application domain that their work is about. Consider this excerpt from ICWSM's call for papers,... Continue Reading →
The US Twitter landscape isn’t as political as it’s made out to be
Written by Subhayan Mukerjee, Kokil Jaidka, Yphtach Lelkes for Nicolas Berube, La Presse CanadaBased on the findings of our paper, recently accepted in Political Communication Image: LaPresse Canada Were you surprised when you realized that politics isn't the main driver of the US Twitterverse?It’s somewhat reassuring to see that people on Twitter aren’t that different... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on Vine vs TikTok
Compiled for Romano Santos, Vice. Image: CC Why do you think Vine was so popular, and why do you think it ultimately failed? Vine demonstrated the power of unedited raw video in a social media space saturated with text and touched-up selfies. It created a new genre of fast comedy content that is still nostalgically... Continue Reading →
Measuring political bias in text
Image source: http://snap.stanford.edu/quotus/#about In political science, scholars have reported on the reliability of news: Bhadani, S., Yamaya, S., Flammini, A., Menczer, F., Ciampaglia, G. L., & Nyhan, B. (2022). Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-11. And the ideological leanings of the media firms: Martin, Gregory J and Ali Yurukoglu.... Continue Reading →
Conducting Research with Amazon Mechanical Turk
There's a lot to keep in mind when you're running HITs and experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The diagram you see up above describes how we did the recruitment for our study in which we had to screen and invite thousands of MTurkers into our experiment, just out in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. You... Continue Reading →
About Amazon Mechanical Turk and Fair Pay
If you're using Amazon Mechanical Turk for your research, welcome to the club! I love AMT and its diligent workers. I haven't hit their expectations in terms of fair pay..but I'm trying to get there. The source of this image and story is from Kate Crawford's book, The Atlas of AI. The story goes that... Continue Reading →