2nd Annual Conference on Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS)
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Georgetown University
Georgetown University Hotel and Conference Center, Washington, DC
Objective
The data and methodologies available to social scientists have exploded with the emergence of vast archives of passive data collection, large scale online experimentation, and innovative uses of simulation. These data are of a larger magnitude and methods are of a greater computational complexity than approaches that have dominated political science for the last 50 years. This offers the potential for rich insights into society at scale, while simultaneously introducing new ethical and infrastructural challenges. In parallel, the information and communication technologies that have driven these changes are also driving changes in politics, around the world, that require study. In order to understand the political world, it is increasingly important to gain access to the political communication and behavior occurring online.
Conference Program: Wednesday, August 28, 2019
(download PDF version – including speakers)
click links below for session details and locations
8:00am—8:45am Continental Breakfast (Salon ABG)
8:45am—9:15am Welcoming Remarks (Salon ABG)
9:15am—10:30am Networks | Social Media | NLP
10:30am—10:50am Break
10:50am—12:05pm Methods in CSS | The News | Image
12:05pm—1:30pm Lunch (Salons C,F, H) & Business Meeting (Salon ABG)
1:30pm—2:45pm IR | Journalism | Video
2:45pm—3:00pm . Break
3:00pm—4:15pm Attitudes & Beliefs | Campaigns | Machine Learning
4:15pm—4:30pm Break
4:30pm—5:30pm Keynote Address: Sandra González-Bailón, University of Pennsylvania (Salon ABG)
6:00pm—7:30pm Poster Sessions (see posters tab) & Reception (Sequioa Restaurant)
Session Details
9:15am-10:30am
Networks: (Salon ABG)
- Legislative communication style: linking legislators across medium and message
Rachel Blum, Miami University; Kelsey Shoud, University of South Carolina - Target Policymaking Under the Frame of Dark Networks: Strengths, Weaknesses and Opportunities
Joseph Shaheen, George Mason University - Failure to Communicate: Individual Reasoning Structure and Deliberative Outcomes
Sarah Shugars, Northeastern University - Network Event History Analysis for Modeling Public Policy Adoption with Latent Diffusion Networks
Bruce Desmarais, Pennsylvania State University
Social Media: (Salon C)
- Knowledge Decays: Temporal Validity in Online Social Science
Kevin Munger, Penn State University - Social Media Markets for Survey Research in Comparative Contexts: Facebook Users in Kenya
Leah Rosenzweig, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) - The Influencer Ecosystem in the 2018 U.S. Primaries
Yotam Shmargad, University of Arizona - Journalists on Twitter: Self-branding, Audiences, and Involvement of Bot
Onur Varol, Northeastern University
NLP: (Salon F)
- A Bayesian Transition Network Topic Model for Inferring Conceptual Networks
Nick Beauchamp, Northeastern University - The Mechanics of Emergent Political Voice
Amy Magnus, Air Force Institute of Technology - Humans and Machines Learning Together
Stuart Shulman, Texifter - The Digital Pulpit: A Nationwide Analysis of Online Sermons
Dennis Quinn, Pew Research Center
10:50am-12:05pm
Methods in Computational Social Science: (Salon ABG)
- 311: What’s Your Emergency?
Rebekah Getman, Northeastern University - Shifting Sands: An Agent-Based Model of Mobilization Against a Central Authority
Soha Hammam, Claremont Graduate University - Analyzing Link Sharing Across Platforms to Study Political Messaging and Ideology
Joshua Tucker, NYU - Event Data with Images
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, UCLA
The News: (Salon C)
- The Distorting Prism of Social Media: How Online Comments Amplify Toxicity
Jin Woo Kim, Dartmouth College - Affective Polarization in Online Uncivil Comments
Yujin Kim, University of Texas at Austin - Nationalized news: using large-scale collections of close captions text to identify national network stories in local news broadcasts
Pavel Oleinikov, Wesleyan University - Measuring the European public sphere across multiple languages
Maurits van der Veen, College of William & Mary
Image: (Salon F)
- Ideological Scaling of Political Images
Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld, UCLA - Using Computer Vision to Capture the Collective Perception of a Neighborhood
Jeffrey Sternberg, Northeastern University - How do Machines See Gender? Demystifying a machine vision system
Emma Remy, Pew Research Center - Do Women Candidates “Run as Women” Online? An Automated Image and Text Analysis of Campaign Advertising on Facebook and TV
Jielu Yao, Wesleyan University & University of Iowa
1:30pm-2:45pm
IR: (Salon ABG)
- Text-Based Approaches to Analyzing Group Behavior in Conflict Setting
Margaret Foster, Duke University - Where the money blows – Using speeches to identify the effect of Chinese foreign aid on the US-African relationship structure
Dennis Hammerschmidt, University of Mannheim - Measuring a Threat Perception: Text Analysis of the Speech Records of the United Nations Security Council, 1994-2019
Takuto Sakamoto, University of Tokyo - Detecting Foreign Influence Operations’ Content on Social Media
Meysam Alizadeh, Princeton University
Journalism: (Salon C)
- Systematic biases in local news search results: an audit study
Sean Fischer, University of Pennsylvania - Can Digital Literacy Save Us from Fake News? Evidence from the U.S.
Andy Guess, Princeton University - How Does the Media Environment Affect Readership? Evidence from an App Patient-Preferred Trial in Italy
Alessandro Vecchiato, Stanford - Online Information Seeking during the 2018 U.S. Congressional Elections
David Lazer, Northeastern University
Video: (Salon F)
- Automated Coding of Political Campaign Advertisement Videos: A Validation Study
Wonjoon Hwang, Harvard University - Comparing Human and Machine Classification of Written and Video Records of Parliamentary Debates
Christopher Cochrane, University of Toronto - How Online Propaganda Radicalizes Foreign Citizens
Tamar Mitts, Columbia University - Mapping Extremist Networks with Visual Imagery
Rob Williams, UNC Chapel Hill
3:00pm-4:15pm
Attitudes & Beliefs: (Salon ABG)
- Religiosity and Public Policy in Congress: Analyzing the partisan dimensions of legislators’ religious rhetoric
Sarah Dreier, University of Washington - Gender Norms and Violent Behavior in a Virtual World
Eric Dunford, Georgetown University - Ecologies of Online Contention: From Hate to Health
Nicolas Velásquez, George Washington University - Can Celebrities Reduce Prejudice? The Effect of Mohamed Salah on Islamophobic Attitudes and Behaviors
Alexandra Siegel, Stanford University
Campaigns: (Salon C)
- Downsian Convergence on Non-Policy Issues: Evidence from Campaign Manifestos at French Legislative Elections
Caroline Le Pennec, University of California, Berkeley - The Supply and Demand of Fact v. Opinion in Presidential Tweets
Stan Oklobdzija, Claremont McKenna College - Pandering Politicians: Ideological Changes from Primary to General Elections
Ye Wang, New York University - From Home Base to Swing States: Spatio-temporal Analysis of Political Advertising Strategies
Piotr Sapiezynski, Northeastern University
Machine Learning: (Salon F)
- Automated Visual Clustering: A Technique for Image Corpus Exploration and Annotation Cost Reduction
Kevin Aslett, University of Washington - Active Learning for Probabilistic Record Linkage
Ted Enamorado, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Data-driven causal inference for applications in political economy
Daniel Malinsky, Johns Hopkins University - A Computational Social Science Approach to Financial Regulation
Sharyn O’Halloran, Columbia University