3. Digital Health Communication and Punk Rock Academics with Ethan Zuckerman

3. Digital Health Communication and Punk Rock Academics with Ethan Zuckerman

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li June 15, 2021 Duration: 41:34

In this episode, we talk to Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches public policy, communication, and information. We discuss his paper "Digital Health Communication and Global Public Influence: A Study of the Ebola Epidemic" which was published in the Journal of Health Communication in 2017. His co-authors on this paper include technical and visualization experts (Hal Roberts and Sands Alden Fish II), a global public health expert (Brittany Seymour), and expert in education policy (Emily Robinson).

Ethan talks about creating Media Cloud--an open-source platform for media analysis that tracks millions of stories published online--over the course of two decades and the "fearsome process" of scaling it up. He also discussed with us being an unconventional "punk-rock" academic and advice to "scratch your deep itch" when it comes to choosing which research directions to pursue.

Link: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10810730.2016.1209598


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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