13. Finding (Mis)alignments in Public Opinion and Wisdom in Collaboration Management with Kenneth Joseph and Sarah Shugars

13. Finding (Mis)alignments in Public Opinion and Wisdom in Collaboration Management with Kenneth Joseph and Sarah Shugars

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li February 10, 2022 Duration: 49:43

Our guests on this episode are Kenneth Joseph, an assistant professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Buffalo, and Sarah Shugars, a Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Center for Data Science. We discuss the process behind their EMNLP 2021 paper, “(Mis)alignment Between Stance Expressed in Social Media Data and Public Opinion Surveys,” co-authored with Ryan Gallagher, Jon Green, Alexi Quintana Mathé, Zijian An, and David Lazer.

Kenneth and Sarah offer tips around communication, collaboration, and project management, especially for papers written during a pandemic. Kenneth talks about “privileging ethics” when making decisions around data privacy and experimental replicability, and Sarah reflects on navigating differences in terminology use in interdisciplinary environments.


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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