ZENING DUAN

Community

I’m lucky to work with a great mix of teammates, colleagues, and friends to push the boundaries of computational social science. We’re building a global community of researchers through cool projects like the Computational Methods Research Group and COMputation Island. Come join us and check out our latest updates in this exciting field.

Computational Methods Research Group

The Computational Methods Research Group (CMRG) at the University of Wisconsin, Madison is an interdisciplinary community of graduate students interested in computational methods and its use in social science research.

Our core interest is the application of computational methods to answer complex and important questions about how people and algorithmic actors communicate with one another. We have two goals: (1) to perform cutting-edge computational social science research and (2) to build a community for scholars to teach scholars about new tools, programs, datasets, and resources.

The Computational Methods Research Group began as the “Machine Learning Workshop” in the Spring 2015 semester by charter lead Junghwan Yang. Josephine Lukito, Chuan Liu and other student leads have taken the baton to serve this community. Our members have spanned a wide range of academic disciplines, including Computer Engineering, Informatics, Journalism & Mass Communication, Statistics, Library Services, Political Science, and Communication Arts.

We are a sister taxon of the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication‘s Social Media and Democracy Research Group. We are also affiliated with the Mass Communication Research Center.

Interested in our workshops and brownbags? Details here: https://computational.journalism.wisc.edu/seminars/

COMputational Island

COMputation Island (“计传岛” in Chinese) is a WeChat-based online platform for developing computational communication research (CCR) and computational social science research, co-founded by Zening Duan (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Yingdan Lu (Northwestern University), and Yiyan Zhang (Renmin University of China).

Since January 2021, COMputation Island team has created more than 60 original articles to share cutting-edge research, facilitate academic discussions, and promote resource exchanges to more than 10,000 Mandarin-speaking students and scholars in Asia, North America, Europe, and other regions, and the community is still growing. To build an influential community of young CCR scholars, COMputation Island invites outstanding CCR scholars to share their insights on CCR research and career trajectories. Some spotlight articles (in Chinese) are listed below:

Learning Computational Communication and Resources:

  • Learning Computational Communication: Ten Things You Need to Know (Article Link)
  • Recommended Readings for Computational Communication Research (Article Link)

Computational Methods and Digital Databases:

  • Screenomics: a New Method in Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Introduction to Digital News Databases (Article Link)
  • Using Twitter Data for Research: Tools, Costs, Skillsets and Lessons Learned (Article Link)
  • Applying Semantic Network Analysis to Analyze Online Text Corpora (Article Link)

Cutting-edge Research in Computational Social Science

  • Guided Readings for “Computational Social Science” Special Issue in Nature (Article Link)
  • Guided Readings for “Images as Data” Special Issue in Computational Communication Research (Article Link)
  • From World of Warcraft to Social Networks: Learning Pop Culture with Computational Communication (Article Link)

Interviews from Leading Scholars

  • Professor Jonathan Zhu: the Past, Present and Future of Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Professor Cuihua (Cindy) Shen: Doing Meaningful Research in Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Professor Lei Guo: Classical Theory Meets Computational Method (Article Link)