Conference Agenda

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

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

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

2nd Annual Conference on Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS)Wednesday, August 28, 2019Georgetown UniversityGeorgetown University Hotel and Conference Center, Washington, DC