CssReadingList

Books

1. Bit by Bit - Salganik
2. Decoding the Social World - González-Bailón (Video)
3. Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication - Foucault Welles and González-Bailón

Articles

General

1. "Computational Social Science" - Lazer, Pentland, Adamic, Aral, Barabasi, Brewer, Christakis, Contractor, Fowler, Gutmann, Jebara, King, Macy, Roy, and Van Alstyne (2009)
2. "The cultural environment: measuring culture with big data" - Bail (2014)
3. "Social science in the era of big data" - González‐Bailón (2013)
4. "Computational Social Science ≠ Computer Science + Social Data" - Wallach (2018)
5. "Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon" - boyd and Crawford (2012)
6. "Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior" - Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel (2013)
7. "Digital Footprints: Opportunities and Challenges for Online Social Research" - Golder and Macy (2014)
8. "Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities" - Lazer et. al. (2020)
9. "Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication" - Theocharis and Jungherr (2020)
10. "The empiricist’s challenge: Asking meaningful questions in political science in the age of big data" - Jungherr and Theocharis (2017)

Experiments

• Do social rewards lead to an increase in participation on Wikipedia?
  • "Experimental Study of Informal Rewards in Peer Production" - Restivo and van de Rijt (20120)
• Does exposure to opposing political views increase political polarization?
  • "Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization" - Bail, Argyle, Brown, Bumpus, Chen, Hunzaker, Lee, Mann, Merhout, and Volfovsky (2018)
• Do cues on social media...
  • "A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization" - Bond, Fariss, Jones, Kramer, Marlow, Settle, and Fowler (2012)
  • "Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks" - Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock (2014)
• Do early advantages lead to further inequality in the consumption of music?
  • "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market" - Salganik, Dodds, and Watts (2006)

Simulations

• Can mental representation processes explain cultural emergence?
  • "Mechanics and dynamics of social construction: Modeling the emergence of culture from individual mental representation " - Shaw (2015)
• What factors influence police behavior?
  • "How Officers Create Guardianship: An Agent‐based Model of Policing" - Wise and Cheng (2016)

Networks

• How do groups organize on social media?
  • "Hijacking #MYNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics" - Jackson and Foucault Welles (2015)
  • "#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks" - Jackson and Foucault Welles (2015)
  • "Divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter" - Gallagher, Reagan, Danforth, and Dodds (2018)
  • "The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment through an Online Network" - González-Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, Rivero, and Moreno (2011)
  • "Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion" - González-Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, and Moreno (2013)
• How do liberal and conservative blogs link to one another?
  • "The political blogosphere and the 2004 US election: divided they blog" - Adamic and Glance (2005)
• Can we identify friendship relations from communication trace data?
  • "Inferring friendship network structure by using mobile phone data" - Eagle, Pentland, and Lazer (2009)
• What can network structure tell us about institutional gender imabalances?
  • "Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia" - Wagner, Graells-Garrido, Garcia and Menczer (2016)
• What can network structure tell us about how we participate in online dating?
  • "Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets" - Bruch and Newman (2018)

Estimating Latent Characteristics

• Do choices of who to follow on Twitter reveal ideological preferences?
  • "Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data" - Barberá (2017)
• Do choices of which pages to like on Facebook reveal ideological preferences?
  • "Quantifying Social Media’s Political Space: Estimating Ideology from Publicly Revealed Preferences on Facebook" - Bond and Messing (2015)
• Does the use of language refelect emotional states?
  • "Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents - Dodds and Danforth (2010)
  • "Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures" - Golder and Macy (2011)
  • "Twitter mood predicts the stock market" - Bollen, Mao, and Zeng (2011)
• Are there problems with how we use social-media to infer ideological preferences?
  • "Digital Trace Data in the Study of Public Opinion: An Indicator of Attention Toward Politics Rather Than Political Support" - Jungherr, Schoen, and Posegga (2016)

News Exposure

• Do online behaviors lead to diversity in the news we are exposed to and consume?
  • "Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook" - Bakshy, Messing, and Adamic (2015)

Platform Studies

• Are digital platforms biased?
  • "The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections" - Epstein and Robertson (2015)
  • "Auditing local news presence on Google News" - Fischer, Jaidka, and Lelkes (2020)
  • "Auditing Partisan Audience Bias within Google Search" - Robertson et. al. (2018)
  • "Auditing the Personalization and Composition of Politically-Related Search Engine Results Pages" - Robertson, Lazer, and Wilson (2018)
• What are the consequences of algorithmic decision making?
  • "Birds of a Feather Get Recommended Together: Algorithmic Homophily in YouTube’s Channel Recommendations in the United States and Germany" - Kaiser and Rauchfleisch (2020)

Policy Evaluation

• How can we measure economic impacts?
  • "Evaluating the impact of the 2012 Olympic Games policy on the regeneration of East London using spatio-temporal big data" - Zhou, Hristova, Noulas, and Mascolo (2018)
• How do governments censor their citizens?
  • "How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression" - King, Pan, and Roberts (2013)

Language

• Can we use the questions asked of athletes to identify subtle gender biases?
  • "Tie-breaker: Using language models to quantify gender bias in sports journalism" - Fu, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lee
• *Can social media posts show that counselling strategies are working fo