I am thrilled to announce that I will be joining
@NorthwesternU
@NU_SoC
as an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies this Fall🎉🎉I am grateful to join this amazing community of fascinating colleagues and bright students! Huge thanks to everyone who helped me get here! 1/5
It feels so unreal, but yes, I successfully passed my dissertation defense! 🎓Huge thanks to my advisor
@jenjpan
, committee members
@jeffhancock
@AngeleChristin
@xuyiqing
and friends for all the support along the way. Such a great honor to spend my best 6 years with you all!
Leaving
#Stanford
today. Farewells are extremely tough to the best place for learning, where eight years brought joy, tears, and growth. Huge thanks to my amazing advisors and friends for making this journey unforgettable. See you again soon, and excited for what lies ahead🎉
Thrilled about receiving this top student award and for such a great encouragement right before my upcoming dissertation defense! Huge thanks to my fantastic collaborator,
@pengyilang
, and the support from the
#polcomm
division!!
Finished the last Spring lecture of my first PhD course Computational Communication Research today. Super rewarding experience in designing, preparing, and teaching this course. I learned so much from my wonderful and talented students! Thank you all for a fruitful
#CSS
quarter!!
Excited to launch our Computational Multi-Modal Communication Lab website: ! With
@cuihua
,
@pengyilang
& our excellent students, we're dedicated to understanding visual and multimodal information using
#computationalmethods
. Visit our website to learn more!
Check out our new article where we focused on
#visual
#misinformation
and identified a theoretical framework that explains the persuasive mechanisms and pathways of visual features in lending
#credibility
🎉First paper from our team and more soon!
New pub alert! How does media consumption influence nation-related conspiracy beliefs? Our new
#IJPP
paper (w/
@AnfanChen
@Kaiping_Chen
@TheRealAaronNG
) examines this through a novel perspective of gov't media consumption in the Chinese context. More in🧵:
Thrilled to talk about my research at the Computational Social Science Research Seminar this upcoming Thursday! Many thanks to
@dashunwang
,
@binglu_wang
, and the other brilliant colleagues at
@KelloggCSSI
for inviting and hosting me!
We're thrilled to host Yingdan Lu (
@YingdanL_kk
) this week as our first speaker in our Computational Social Science series! Come join us at the Kellogg Global Hub on Thursday, February 8th!
Excited to announce that we will be hosting the Summer Institute in Computational Social Sciences at Chicago
#SICSSChicago2024
on August 4-8, 2024! Applications now open: . Check out our fantastic speaker lineup and join us for
#ComputationalSocialScience
📣📣 Call for Applications! The Summer Institute in Computational Social Science at Chicago (
#SICSSChicago2024
) is excited to announce its return! Join us for a 5-day intensive training session from August 4-8 at
@NorthwesternU
!🔥🔥
Check our website:
Interested in analyzing videos computationally? Join our (
@ica_cm
@Kaiping_Chen
)
#ica22
panel Video-as-data in Computational Communication on May 28! You will hear about innovative data, methods and frameworks in studying large video datasets across platforms and cultures!
#ML
#DL
Excited to present four of my works at
#ICA23
! One highlight:
@Kaiping_Chen
and I will co-chair another video-as-data panel “Video-as-data in computational communication: Toward a mixed-method pathway”
@ica_cm
. Five brilliant papers+great discussant+mixed-method conversations🥳
Still feeling unreal about this, but immensely grateful for the unwavering support and guidance from the best advisor in the world!! Cheers to finishing this milestone together! 🎉🎉
Huge congratulations to Dr. Yingdan Lu
@YingdanL_kk
on successfully defending her dissertation "Performative Propaganda Engagement: How Celebrity Fandom Engages with State Propaganda in China”! Check out more of her work at
New pub alert✨Excited to share our new research (w/
@pengyilang
) on the mobilization power of visual media across stages of social-mediated protests, published in
@polcommjournal
. More in this thread🧵
Fantastic opportunity to share my research with the wonderful
#SICSSSingapore
students and organizers! Enjoyed the engaging questions and discussions a lot. Thanks for having me!
#SICSSSingapore
Day 5:
@YingdanL_kk
captivated us with her fascinating research on political visual analysis and multimodal computational research. Her talk highlights the immense potential of large multimodal models (LMM) for social science research.
Very honored and excited to join
@StanfordHAI
as a Grad Fellow! With the program's support, I’ll continue my research to improve our understanding of the use of AI by authoritarian regimes in the digital age. Looking forward to interacting with everyone in this amazing community!
A warm welcome to our newest graduate fellows! Joining us from across
@Stanford
schools, these students will learn from HAI faculty and share perspectives from their individual disciplines including engineering, medicine, education, and more.
So excited to see our paper finally out in New Media & Society! We found racial inequality in influencer compensation through mixed-method analyses of
#Instagram
worker-generated data. Wonderful collab w/
@AngeleChristin
and greatly inspiring my research in this emerging area!
Day 1 of my first in-person
#APSA2022
:
Slept for 4-hrs because of jet lag✅
Presented one paper and got super helpful feedback✅
Learned a ton from four fascinating projects/talks✅
Took several long walks with my advisor and friends✅
And tried two good restaurants on my list✅
This Thursday at
#USFEconomicsSeminar
, our speaker will be
@YingdanL_kk
, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Dept of Communication at
@Stanford
, advised by Prof Jennifer Pan.
Yingdan will give a talk on “Competing for Attention: How the Chinese Government Uses Social Media for Propaganda”.
A full room again! Thanks everyone for coming to our Images as Data panel! Thanks to all speakers for sharing fantastic research and to our discussant
@pengyilang
for sharing his insightful comments! We cannot wait to organize our 4th
@ica_cm
panel in
@icahdq
Denver next year!!
🚀We (
@YingdanL_kk
) had such an amazing panel today on "Image as Data in the Generative AI age"
@ica_cm
. Our speakers showed representational biases, features and perceptions of AI-generated images across countries, and theorized what biases mean in vision language models.
#ica24
Great to be in this conference
#TSRC2022
and excited to learn there’s an increasing research interest in trust & safety on short-video platforms. Also another presentation of our
#TikTok
#misinformation
project! Very exhausted after this but got tons of great comments/feedback!
Excited to publish my first image-as-data paper with
@jenjpan
! We combine analysis of video, text and metadata to examine 50K Douyin Trending videos, and find the pervasive presence of the Chinese regime to compete for attention. Also enjoyed all amazing works in this SI, yay!
Early Christmas present: Although our special issue "Images as Data" edited by
@CasAndreu
and
@norawwilliams
will only be officially published next year, you can already check out the preprints + code of the accepted articles on our website
#openaccess
🎉 Thanks to our (
@Kaiping_Chen
) amazing panelists, discussant, and audiences for insightful discussions on Video as Data! Their fresh perspectives of using
#computational
methods & digital
#ethnography
on
#videos
enhance our understanding of communication theories!
#ICA23
#DL
Our new article is out! We propose a sociotechnical-lens framework, provide the first empirical examination of the knowledge claims & epistemic approaches used in
#digitaltrace
#communication
scholarship studying
#China
in the past 30 years, and address two practices + directions
✨To what extent digital traces can reveal about human activities and opinions? 👀
Our new publication (w/
@YingdanL_kk
@YimingWang_
) introduces a sociotechnical evaluation framework and delves into 30 years of digital trace studies on China.
Dive in!👇
If you are applying or thinking of applying to Northwestern's Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) PhD program
@NU_SoC
@NorthwesternEng
, come and join our info session on Oct 26, 12pm Central Time! Registration link here: . We hope to see you there!
Interested in doing a PhD in HCI, CSS, or something else at the intersection of Tech + Society? The
@NU_SoC
@NorthwesternEng
joint program in TSB is hosting a virtual information session to answer your questions. Register and join to learn more!
Very excited to welcome
@YingdanL_kk
to visit
@UIOWA_SJMC
and
@IowaCommStudies
this week to present "Crossing Digital Borders: Computational Understandings of Multilingual Cross-Platform Information Flows."
🚀 Excited to share that our
#ICA24
preconference, The Future of Computational Message Science, was a great success yesterday! Our speakers and panelists delivered fascinating talks, and the participants were very engaged. Thank you to everyone who made it an unforgettable event!
Excited to chair this
#ICA23
@ica_cm
"Video-as-data" panel again with
@Kaiping_Chen
! Our wonderful panelists will share novel
#computational
tools and
#qualitative
approaches to study videos collected from diverse channels. Come and join us May 27, 3-4:15pm, M Norfolk (Sheraton)!
Interested in learning how to use a mixed-method approach (e.g., computer vision, ethnography) to study videos for communication research? We (
@YingdanL_kk
) are holding the panel "Video-as-data in Computational Communication" again
#ICA23
@ica_cm
. Join us Sat 3pm at M Norfolk!👇
Excited to share that our panel proposal (w/
@Kaiping_Chen
)"Video-as-data in computational communication" has made it to
#ica22
@ica_cm
! We will have international scholars to share five brilliant projects on the frontiers of computational analysis of video data in comm research!
The conference was a tremendous success! Wonderful keynotes, panels, and organization! Thank you so much
@richardhuskey
@soojongkim_1
and
@hjhether
for bringing it all together!
Come and join our
#ica24
panel on June 22, 3-4:15 pm at Coolangatta 3 (Star L3)! This is the third year
@Kaiping_Chen
and I organizing a panel on image as data, and we have a fantastic paper lineup this year as well!
🧨We (
@YingdanL_kk
) are so excited to organize "Image-as-Data Methods in the Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence"
#ICA24
@ica_cm
!
Our speakers will share computational methods for studying AI-Generated Images to understand misinformation and equity. Check our panel below👇
#ica22
Day 2&3 - presented two papers using different
#computational
methods to analyze
#propaganda
#videos
and
#factchecking
videos on the Chinese
#TikTok
. Plus inspiring talks with brilliant scholars and great time with friends. Tmr I will present two papers (more in threads):
Hello from Amsterdam! My first
@SASE_Meeting
was off to a good start with watching great talks and connecting with new people☺️Monday 8:30-10:00, I’ll present a paper (w/
@AngeleChristin
) on
#influencer
pay gap. Excited for the first talk on this mixed-method work!
#SASE2022
Excited to share my research on performative propaganda engagement and learn from all the wonderful speakers at this conference next week! Thank you so much
@EHWpolisci
and
@amycatalinac
for putting this together!!
Last call for
#SICSSChicago2024
submissions!🔔🔔 Come and join us in Chicago for a fantastic
#ComputationalSocialScience
training at Northwestern University, connect with your CSS community!👭
For the full lineup of speakers, visit our website 🔽
As a first-gen scholar, I couldn’t have got here without the huge support from my family in
#Beijing
, especially my mom, who always has faith in me and supports every decision I make. Great to make them proud and we are all excited for my journey ahead! 4/5
Check out our ongoing work on Weibo sentiment about
#RussiaUkraine
conflict. Some preliminary findings in thread. Also credit to our excellent RAs who have been devoting time and energy to this urgent but important work!
For the past few weeks,
@YingdanL_kk
@AnfanChen
& I have systematically collected half a million Weibo posts about Ukraine. It’s true that a large portion of Weibo posts attribute cause of war to US/NATO/“Western” aggression or blame Ukrainian government for conflict.
#IVOTEDICA2022
Time to vote for
@icahdq
and this year I am running for the Student & Early Career Rep for the Computational Methods Division
@ica_cm
! Excited to contribute to better CM training, community building, and outreach, and I appreciate your vote!
The deadline extended to June 7! Come and join our
#ICA24
preconference on computational message science on June 19 at QUT💡Check out our fantastic speakers lineup of speakers, and register here:
Come and join our
#ICA24
preconference on June 19 at QUT, Brisbane! Fantastic lineup of speakers and exciting discussions about computational message science! Registration deadline is now May 31 via this link: .
@ica_cm
@icahdq
Excited to see our paper with
@jenjpan
now available online in Political Communication. We identify a strategy of using clickbait to increase the visibility of political propaganda through ethnography + computational analysis of WeChat data. Check it out!
📢New publication Alert, just online
@poli_com
:
Capturing Clicks: How the Chinese Government Uses Clickbait to Compete for Visibility
✍️
@YingdanL_kk
&
@jenjpan
(
@Stanford
)
🇨🇳"Clickbait ➡️ more views & likes + greater reach of government propaganda"
Last day at
#ica22
- wrapped up the academic part of my trip with two presentations on
#authoritarian
media and politics. After three days when
#Paris
only means two conf hotels, I marked my last evening in Paris with sightseeing, Michelin Guide food, shopping, and music.
Huge congrats to
@catherinetychen
and so happy to see this promising junior scholar to start her new journey at LSU!! Has learned a ton from Catherine and got so much support from her throughout my PhD journey. Can’t wait to learn more good research from her!!
📚Career Update📚
I'm thrilled to join
@LSU
as a tenure-track Assistant Prof in Political Comm at
@ManshipSchool
& Pol Sci Dept! I am also honored to be appointed to the prestigious Mary P. Poindexter Endowed Professorship. Excited to start this new journey!
#GeauxTigers
🐯
Excited to see our
@pengyilang
chapter “Computational visual analysis in political communication” is out today in this fantastic book! We provide a systematic review of automated visual analysis in
#polcomm
. Many thanks to the editors
@anveneti
and
@DrDGL
for this fabulous book!
📢Excited to share that the
@ElgarPublishing
Research Handbook on Visual Politics co- edited by
@DrDGL
and
@anveneti
is out now with 31 chapters by a stellar line up of experts in the field
Thanks to
@YingdanL_kk
for having me to your class at
@NorthwesternU
! It was enlightening to connect my research on AI actors and attention amplification w/ the class theme on digital propaganda and repression. Engaging with bright young scholars made for fantastic discussions!
📰 personal update: I'm so happy to say I've accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at
@UWMadison
@uw_sjmc
for next year. To return home to my alma mater is a privilege and a dream.
Great work from Jiaxin!! 🎉🎉Got to know this magic potato first time in a virtual workshop months ago, and excited to see how this will help more researchers with their text annotation tasks!!
Introducing 🥔POTATO: The Portable Text Annotation Tool. Potato comes with 20+ templates for many types of labeling tasks, editable UI, pre-screening questions, and many other features that can make data annotation easier and better.
Github:
(1/8)
Excited to share our latest work in this great new journal
@journalqd
! We apply both human annotation and deep learning to describe Weibo discussions of Covid-19 and find simultaneous spikes of criticism and support in reaction to events. For more findings, check out our paper!
Happy to share our new paper published in the inaugural volume of
@journalqd
. By analyzing millions of social media posts on Sina Weibo, we describe the public sentiment when the Covid-19 crisis first broke out in China.
@YingdanL_kk
@jenjpan
#Videoasdata
in
#computational
#communication
panel started from a wonderful dinner and ended up with five excellent presentations! Shout out to the best co-chair
@Kaiping_Chen
, our great panelists and discussants, and the audience! Excited to work more together for this field!
Come and join our
#ICA24
preconference on June 19 at QUT, Brisbane! Fantastic lineup of speakers and exciting discussions about computational message science! Registration deadline is now May 31 via this link: .
@ica_cm
@icahdq
Today at
@UW_LSC
#LSC460
Social Media Analytics class, we had two amazing guest speakers
@YingdanL_kk
@BretShaw1
introduce to students about new ways of measuring & collecting user engagement via millions of mobile screenshots and paid digital advertising.
#datascience
#scicomm
Now that the (DocuSign) ink is dry, I am thrilled to share that starting August 2025 I will be a tenure-track assistant professor in the School of Information at UT Austin! It will be an amazing place to continue my research on older adults’ digital media use.
@UTAustin
@UTiSchool
✨✨ I'm looking to hire a postdoc to do research in 2024 at the intersection of generative AI & cognitive science through NICO where lots of awesome research is happening!!
Please spread the word & apply below!
#computationalsocialscience
#postdocjobs
Excited to see this
#imageasdata
special issue out! So many amazing works! Check out our work with
@jenjpan
on pervasive presence of Chinese government content on
#Douyin
trending videos, a
#multimodal
analysis of video, text and metadata on 50K videos:
Our special issue on Images as Data has now been finally officially published! Check it out here: Thanks to our amazing guest editors
@CasAndreu
@norawwilliams
and all authors who contributed to this issue.
Come and join our
#ica24
panel on June 22, 3-4:15 pm at Coolangatta 3 (Star L3)! This is the third year
@Kaiping_Chen
and I organizing a panel on image as data, and we have a fantastic paper lineup this year as well!
Cannot stop promoting this panel to everyone I met in
#ica22
as we have such great papers, panelists and discussants!! Come to our panel and see how
#video
data can be used in
#computational
#communication
research! Also, mask on so that everyone can enjoy the talks in a safe way
I have also learned so much from many brilliant scholars outside of Stanford who offered me great help! So proud to be part of the
#PolComm
#ComputationalSocialScience
and
#ChinesePolitics
academic communities, and looking forward to continuing my research in these areas! 3/5
🚨📬 New paper out in
@NatureHumBehav
w/
@RyanMooreComm
and
@Ross_Dahlke
How many Americans were exposed to misinformation during the 2020 election?
We find that 26.2% of Americans were exposed in 2020 compared to 44.3% during the 2016 election.
🧵👇
My first 2-day academic trip to HK! Had a deep talk with Prof. Kingwa Fu and his group
@hku
on
#wechatscope
, made new friends with scholars on China studies, and learned more insightful projects on
#computationalsocialscience
through the symposium. So intense but truly worth it!
Everyday at
#SICSS
is so rewarding! Got chance to learn new knowledge from speakers and group presentations, learned a ton from young promising scholars from different disciplines, and more importantly, met new friends who share the same research interest!
We sincerely appreciate the sponsorship by ICA Computational Methods Division
@ica_cm
and Mass Communication Division. And Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane for location support. We look forward to seeing you there!!
Trailer of trailer: we have international scholars from ten institutions who work on the frontiers of developing and applying
#computationalmethods
to demonstrate how they analyze large-scale
#socialmedia
#videos
to study political and science
#communication
. More soon!
🎬Just finished making the Trailer for our
#ica22
@ica_cm
panel "Video-as-data in Computational Communication" with
@YingdanL_kk
. Look forward to turning it into production and sharing, coming soon...
How do far-right media leverage social media logics and entertainment content to amplify their voices? We are excited to share our new research in New Media & Society (w/
@tianyangyt
@fangkc
).
🚨New Paper🚨"Quantifying Partisan News Diets in Web and TV Audiences" in
@ScienceAdvances
with Dan Muise
@homahmrd
Baird Howland
@markusmobius
@duncanjwatts
: if you are concerned about partisan-segregation, you should be focused on TV, not online 1/7
An intense but fruitful trip for me. Finished three to-dos for myself: 1) talked with 50+ new people; 2) individual meetings with 10 of my admired researchers, and 3) explore & reflect on who I am as a researcher. Thanks
@icahdq
for organizing and next trip will be
@SASE_Meeting
New JoC publication on visual misinformation on Facebook w/
@MattHindman
and Trevor Davis (
@counteraction
)! The problem of misinformation is WORSE than you think.
Don't miss it! Join us at
#ica24
for a deep dive into Computational Communication Research in the Global South!
🗓️ Friday, Jun 21
⏰ 1:30 PM
📍 Coolangatta 3 (Star L3)
Be there and be inspired!
Our research contributes to a multifaceted understanding of the role of visual media in social movements, highlighting communication strategies against social inequalities. Our ongoing research (w/
@cuihua
@cuhkhailiang
) in
#ICA24
is extending this work to more protests worldwide.
(1) How did coverage of China change after NYT/Wapo/WSJ journalists were expelled in March 2020? Slight changes, but largely resilient — new paper with
@jenjpan
in
@journal_of_communication
about how news outlets remained flexible to maintain consistent coverage (link at end)
A huge thanks to the Computational Methods Division (
@ica_cm
) and the Mass Communication Division for their generous sponsorship. Special thanks to
@antmandan
and QUT colleagues for a wonderful venue and logistics assistance, and to all colleagues who helped us promote!
Visuals play a crucial role, but not all visuals are equal. Our research shows that photographs featuring crowds are particularly successful in attracting audience engagement. Human-based photographs also perform better than non-photograph visuals in terms of audience engagement.
As these video features were correlated with each other, we established three types of fact-checking videos on Douyin through feature
#clustering
: long storytelling cartoons, short stimulating videos, and short authoritative videos.
This paper saw its first draft in my first year of PhD, and landed finally in sight in my fifth year. It was indeed a hard journey, and I want to say THANK YOU to: our participants, our best colleagues and RAs of the
#Screenomics
Lab, and everyone who helped us push this forward!
New paper
@JournalSafeTech
takes a deep dive on the potential of "Mis-experiences" and highlights the experiential, immersive nature of false information in VR. Instead of being alarmist, we suggest ways to bring more stakeholders into the conversation.
Applying unsupervised image clustering on millions of visuals, we identified four main content categories: crowd-based protest photos, non-crowd-protest human photos, non-human photos, and non-photograph visuals.
Great paper for people who want to do large-scale image analysis and who are interested in
#imageasdata
! I myself got so many inspirations from Yilang's work and I believe this unsupervised image clustering method has great potentials to solve different research questions!
Do you have large-scale image data but don't know where to start?
In a new article in Sociological Methods & Research, we (w/
@hanzhang_pton
) introduce image clustering as an unsupervised method to automatically discover hidden categories from unlabeled images.
Yesterday I had a great talk with one of my academic heroes Prof. Guobin Yang at UPenn. We talked much about the media trend, research, and the field. That excitement and all inspirations I got reactivated my sleeping disorder (slept for only 4hrs. RIP for my last 2 days in Quals
We collected 4,309 videos from nine Douyin
#factchecking
accounts, and analyzed them by: (1) automated analysis to extract audiovisual features through
#computervision
and
#audio
analysis (e.g., brightness); and (2)
#contentanalysis
to annotate persuasive strategies (e.g., humor)
We are truly grateful to all participants who joined us and shared their valuable insights yesterday. The round-table discussions were super fruitful! We hope that the ideas exchanged will inspire further research and collaboration in computational message science!