10. Political Discourse and Substantive-Methodological Intersections with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling

10. Political Discourse and Substantive-Methodological Intersections with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li December 10, 2021 Duration: 43:17

In this episode, we talk with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling. Justine is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Arthur is a Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. We discuss their 2017 EMNLP paper, with Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, "Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse."

Justine and Arthur touch on how collaborations can provide real insight into other disciplines as well as their different paces and writing norms. We also discuss substantive validation for unsupervised learning methods, marinating in "fun" data, the responsibility of studying political institutions that touch all aspects of human life, and a call for administrators to incentivize these kinds of collaborations.


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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