Things I Am Working On

• Attention Brokers: I am studying a type of influential Twitter user that uses their influence to create ties between their followers and a particular political cause. I call these users attention brokers because they span a structural hole and broker attention across it, eventually rendering their broker role obsolete.
• POTATO: POTATO, or the Panel-based Open Term-level Aggregate Twitter Observatory, is an extension of the Lazer Lab's Twitter Panel dataset. It will make aggregate querying and visualization of the Twitter Panel dataset possible for researchers outside the lab while protecting panel members' privacy.
• Twitter Following Patterns: I am working with coauthors on an analysis of the following patterns of Twitter Panel members, both in terms of who they follow and why they make the following decisions they do. We find that accounts followed by Twitter Panel members cluster into highly specific niches and that during a moment of upheaval, users followed nontraditional thought leaders and elites, presumably looking for guidance.

NSF Materials

In March 2023, I found out that I was awarded an NSF GRFP fellowship. This fellowship will fund the (hopefully) last three years I spend in grad school. I'm putting my materials here in case they are useful to future applicants. I've also included my reviews, one of which found me to be ... pretty basic ... to show how noisy and stochastic the process is.

• NSF Research Proposal
• NSF Personal Statement
• NSF Reviews

Things I've Worked On

• Infograffiti: A PaCSS 2021 workshop on subversive narratives and data visualization that I co-created with Amy Magnus, Layla Hashemi, and Temitayo Osinubi.
• My Undergrad Thesis: I studied The Discourse, a debate on Tumblr about asexual inclusion in the LGBTQ+ community, for my undergraduate Comparative Media Studies thesis at MIT.

Papers

• OpenFraming: an Open-Sourced Tool For Computational Framing Analysis of Multilingual Data (second author)
• You Want a Piece of Me: Britney Spears as a case study on the prominence of hegemonic tales and subversive stories in online media (first author)

Talks

• Attentional Cat-pital: Jorts The Cat’s Disruption of Triad Closure Processes in Social Networks : I gave a talk at PaCSS 2022 about work I've been doing recently on triad closure (or transitivity) processes that are disrupted by Jorts the cat. This is also where I talk about getting longitudinal Twitter network data.
• How to Engineer Big Data : Hayden DelCiello (Lazer Lab co-op) and I gave a talk about writing good code, data engineering practices, and helpful tools and tricks. The slides are in the link!