1. Abolitionist Newspapers and Maintaining 8-Year Project Momentum with Lauren Klein and Sandeep Soni

1. Abolitionist Newspapers and Maintaining 8-Year Project Momentum with Lauren Klein and Sandeep Soni

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li June 12, 2021 Duration: 54:38

This episode features two guests: Lauren Klein, an associate professor of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University, and Sandeep Soni, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Georgia Tech. Their Cultural Analytics paper, "Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Lan­guage Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers", was published earlier this year in 2021, with an additional co-author, computational linguist Jacob Eisenstein.

Sandeep and Lauren discuss the challenges involved in this project---a project that began with a conversation between Lauren and Jacob over dim sum---from gathering and cleaning noisy data to maintaining research momentum over the project’s eight year lifespan.

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.18841


Behind every published paper or headline-grabbing finding using social data, there's a hidden story of collaboration, dead ends, and problem-solving. Diaries of Social Data Research pulls back the curtain on that process. Hosted by researchers Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, and Lucy Li, this series sits down with scholars working at the intersection of computational methods and social science to explore the real, human effort behind the datasets. Each conversation functions like an open research diary, detailing how interdisciplinary teams actually come together, navigate differing academic cultures, and tackle the practical hurdles of working with massive, often messy, information about human behavior. You'll hear about the stalled projects, the unexpected breakthroughs, and the meticulous work that turns a raw idea into a credible contribution. This isn't a podcast about polished results, but about the fascinating and often untold journey of modern research. For anyone curious about how we actually study society through data-the alliances built, the ethics debated, and the code debugged late into the night-this series offers a rare and authentic look inside the lab.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 20

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