My research focuses on how cooperation is created and sustained through communication. I am particularly interested in the role that epistemology plays in cooperation. My research examines the way that problems of inference can lead to problems in anticipating the behavior of others, making cooperation risky or unlikely, as well as how particular communication rules and behaviors can mitigate these risks by addressing these difficulties. My work draws in particular on evolutionary theory, neo-institutional theory and the work of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn.
I typically use network analysis and semantic analysis. In my dissertation I examined how a community of string theorists changed in its social structure and word usage over time. Supervisors: Peter Monge
Understanding the success of augmentative exoskeletons is critical to their impact on society. Ma... more Understanding the success of augmentative exoskeletons is critical to their impact on society. Many exoskeletons are developed to address impairments stemming from neuromotor pathology, which provides guidance for understanding their abilities; however, for augmentative exoskeletons that assist able-bodied users, a clear metric of success remains an open question. In this study, we leverage an approach from economics--the Vickrey second-price auction--to quantify the economic value added by lower-limb exoskeletons during uphill walking. In our protocol, participants describe the monetary compensation needed to continue walking uphill for consecutive bouts of two minutes. To incentivize truthful descriptions of participant's “price to walk,” their compensation amounts were provided as bids in Vickrey auctions before each bout. We compared these data across different conditions to determine the marginal value of the exoskeleton weight, assistance, and weight + assistance. ...
This study describes and tests a model of scientific inquiry as an evolving, organizational pheno... more This study describes and tests a model of scientific inquiry as an evolving, organizational phenomenon. Arguments are derived from organizational ecology and evolutionary theory. The empirical subject of study is an epistemic community of scientists publishing on a research topic in physics: the string theoretic concept of "Dbranes." ❧ The study uses evolutionary theory as a means of predicting change in the way members of the community choose concepts to communicate acceptable knowledge claims. It is argued that the pursuit of new knowledge is risky, because the reliability of a novel knowledge claim cannot be verified until after substantial resources have been invested. Using arguments from both philosophy of science and organizational ecology, it is suggested that scientists can mitigate and sensibly share the risks of knowledge discovery within the community by articulating their claims in legitimate forms, i.e., forms that are testable within and relevant to the comm...
As a countermeasure to disinformation, many fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com, provide v... more As a countermeasure to disinformation, many fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com, provide valuable resources to verify news stories or claims. In this paper, we study how such fact-checking resources are used in online political discussions on Reddit, and how audiences or readers respond to their use in the context of the 2016 US Presidential Election. We first characterize the role of fact-checking resources by developing a typology for labeling instances in which they are employed in three political subreddits, r/politics, r/The_Donald and r/hillaryclinton. We find that fact-checking, when used as a correction to false information, is more prevalent on r/politics than on r/The_Donald or r/hillaryclinton. Next, we quantify audience responses to fact-checking by using comment score as a measure of popularity and find that the correction of facts is also more appreciated in r/politics than the other subreddits. Finally, we estimate the impact of corrections, and other uses of fact-checks, on the sustainability of a conversational thread and find that presence of corrections in r/politics appear to be correlated with short conversations. Overall, these findings indicate that the use of fact-checking resources within r/politics is distinct from more partisan subreddits.
Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020
Written by Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bo... more Written by Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bozarth, Ceren Budak, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lisa K. Fazio, Emilio Ferrara, Andrew J. Flanagin, Ales-sandro Flammini, Deen Freelon, Nir Grinberg, Ralph Hertwig, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kenneth Jo-seph, Jason J. Jones, R. Kelly Garrett, Daniel Kreiss, Shannon McGregor, Jasmine McNealy, Drew Margolin, Alice Marwick, FiIippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Seungahn Nah, Stephan Lewan-dowsky, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Pablo Ortellado, Irene Pasquetto, Gordon Pennycook, Ethan Porter, David G. Rand, Ronald Robertson, Briony Swire-Thompson, Francesca Tripodi, Soroush Vosoughi, Chris Vargo, Onur Varol, Brian E. Weeks, John Wihbey, Thomas J. Wood, & Kai-Cheng Yang
This article showcases current best practices in quantitative organizational communication resear... more This article showcases current best practices in quantitative organizational communication research. We emphasize their value in exploring issues of the day and their relation to other research approaches. Materials are presented around four themes: systematic development and validation of measures, including the use of mixed methods; multiple levels of analysis; the study of change and development over time; and relationships among people, units, organizations, and meanings.
This study examines tweets ( N = 1,103,119) sent by 638 US politicians regarding climate change (... more This study examines tweets ( N = 1,103,119) sent by 638 US politicians regarding climate change ( N = 10,135). Using data reflecting the risks faced and opinions held by their constituents, the extent to which politicians lead—tweeting about climate change for those most at risk, called trusteeship—or follow—tweeting about climate change for those who are already concerned, called playing to the crowed—is examined. Results reveal that while Democrats generally tweet about climate change more often than Republicans, within each party, tweeting frequency is mostly explained by the level of concern in a politicians’ constituency. Objective risks faced by constituents play no role. Analysis of behavior across different office levels—federal, state, and local—also shows that while federal politicians are more partisan, state and local politicians play to the crowd to a greater degree. Analysis of the tweets shows the politicians’ unequal engagement leads to over-representations of some t...
An attribution occurs when an author quotes, paraphrases, or describes the statements and private... more An attribution occurs when an author quotes, paraphrases, or describes the statements and private states of a third party. Journalists use attribution to report statements and attitudes of public figures, organizations, and ordinary individuals. Properly recognizing attributions in context is an essential aspect of natural language understanding and implicated in many NLP tasks, but current resources are limited in size and completeness. We introduce the Political News Attribution Relations Corpus 2016 (PolNeAR)—the largest, most complete attribution relations corpus to date. This dataset greatly increases the volume of high-quality attribution annotations, addresses shortcomings of existing resources, and expands the diversity of publishers sourced. PolNeAR is built on news articles covering the political candidates during the year leading up to US Presidential Election in November of 2016. The dataset will support the creation of sophisticated end-to-end solutions for attribution ...
On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting h... more On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting has garnered much debate in context to the 2016 US Presidential Election. In pursuit of computational evaluation of news text, the statements (attributions) ascribed by media outlets to sources provide a common category of evidence on which to operate. In this paper, we develop an approach to compare partisan traits of news text attributions and apply it to characterize differences in statements ascribed to candidate, Hilary Clinton, and incumbent President, Donald Trump. In doing so, we present a model trained on over 600 in-house annotated attributions to identify each candidate with accuracy > 88%. Finally, we discuss insights from its performance for future research.
This study examines the impact of legitimacy on the dynamics of interorganizational networks with... more This study examines the impact of legitimacy on the dynamics of interorganizational networks within the nongovernmental organizations’ children’s rights community. The 27-year period of analysis included a critical community event: the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Building on theories of organizational evolution, hypotheses proposed that (1) ratification of the UNCRC served to codify and more broadly communicate the legitimate norms of the community, and (2) dissemination of normative information made it easier (a) for less experienced organizations to form and maintain partnerships, and (b) for organizations to form partnerships without reference to shared third-party contacts or dominant organizations. Data analysis via a longitudinal network model supported the hypotheses. Further investigation via an event history analysis suggested that these effects were largely confined to links among organizations in the children’s rights ...
Assessing Partisan Traits of News Text Attributions During the 2016 US Presidential Election, 2018
On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting h... more On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting has garnered much debate in context to the 2016 US Presidential Election. In pursuit of computational evaluation of news text, the statements (attributions) ascribed by media outlets to sources provide a common category of evidence on which to operate. In this paper, we develop an approach to compare partisan traits of news text attributions and apply it to characterize differences in statements ascribed to candidate, Hilary Clinton, and incumbent President, Donald Trump. In doing so, we present a model trained on over 600 in-house annotated attributions to identify each candidate with accuracy > 88%. Finally, we discuss insights from its performance for future research.
Understanding the success of augmentative exoskeletons is critical to their impact on society. Ma... more Understanding the success of augmentative exoskeletons is critical to their impact on society. Many exoskeletons are developed to address impairments stemming from neuromotor pathology, which provides guidance for understanding their abilities; however, for augmentative exoskeletons that assist able-bodied users, a clear metric of success remains an open question. In this study, we leverage an approach from economics--the Vickrey second-price auction--to quantify the economic value added by lower-limb exoskeletons during uphill walking. In our protocol, participants describe the monetary compensation needed to continue walking uphill for consecutive bouts of two minutes. To incentivize truthful descriptions of participant's “price to walk,” their compensation amounts were provided as bids in Vickrey auctions before each bout. We compared these data across different conditions to determine the marginal value of the exoskeleton weight, assistance, and weight + assistance. ...
This study describes and tests a model of scientific inquiry as an evolving, organizational pheno... more This study describes and tests a model of scientific inquiry as an evolving, organizational phenomenon. Arguments are derived from organizational ecology and evolutionary theory. The empirical subject of study is an epistemic community of scientists publishing on a research topic in physics: the string theoretic concept of "Dbranes." ❧ The study uses evolutionary theory as a means of predicting change in the way members of the community choose concepts to communicate acceptable knowledge claims. It is argued that the pursuit of new knowledge is risky, because the reliability of a novel knowledge claim cannot be verified until after substantial resources have been invested. Using arguments from both philosophy of science and organizational ecology, it is suggested that scientists can mitigate and sensibly share the risks of knowledge discovery within the community by articulating their claims in legitimate forms, i.e., forms that are testable within and relevant to the comm...
As a countermeasure to disinformation, many fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com, provide v... more As a countermeasure to disinformation, many fact-checking websites, such as Snopes.com, provide valuable resources to verify news stories or claims. In this paper, we study how such fact-checking resources are used in online political discussions on Reddit, and how audiences or readers respond to their use in the context of the 2016 US Presidential Election. We first characterize the role of fact-checking resources by developing a typology for labeling instances in which they are employed in three political subreddits, r/politics, r/The_Donald and r/hillaryclinton. We find that fact-checking, when used as a correction to false information, is more prevalent on r/politics than on r/The_Donald or r/hillaryclinton. Next, we quantify audience responses to fact-checking by using comment score as a measure of popularity and find that the correction of facts is also more appreciated in r/politics than the other subreddits. Finally, we estimate the impact of corrections, and other uses of fact-checks, on the sustainability of a conversational thread and find that presence of corrections in r/politics appear to be correlated with short conversations. Overall, these findings indicate that the use of fact-checking resources within r/politics is distinct from more partisan subreddits.
Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, 2020
Written by Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bo... more Written by Michelle A. Amazeen, Fabrício Benevenuto, Nadia M. Brashier, Robert M. Bond, Lia C. Bozarth, Ceren Budak, Ullrich K. H. Ecker, Lisa K. Fazio, Emilio Ferrara, Andrew J. Flanagin, Ales-sandro Flammini, Deen Freelon, Nir Grinberg, Ralph Hertwig, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Kenneth Jo-seph, Jason J. Jones, R. Kelly Garrett, Daniel Kreiss, Shannon McGregor, Jasmine McNealy, Drew Margolin, Alice Marwick, FiIippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, Seungahn Nah, Stephan Lewan-dowsky, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Pablo Ortellado, Irene Pasquetto, Gordon Pennycook, Ethan Porter, David G. Rand, Ronald Robertson, Briony Swire-Thompson, Francesca Tripodi, Soroush Vosoughi, Chris Vargo, Onur Varol, Brian E. Weeks, John Wihbey, Thomas J. Wood, & Kai-Cheng Yang
This article showcases current best practices in quantitative organizational communication resear... more This article showcases current best practices in quantitative organizational communication research. We emphasize their value in exploring issues of the day and their relation to other research approaches. Materials are presented around four themes: systematic development and validation of measures, including the use of mixed methods; multiple levels of analysis; the study of change and development over time; and relationships among people, units, organizations, and meanings.
This study examines tweets ( N = 1,103,119) sent by 638 US politicians regarding climate change (... more This study examines tweets ( N = 1,103,119) sent by 638 US politicians regarding climate change ( N = 10,135). Using data reflecting the risks faced and opinions held by their constituents, the extent to which politicians lead—tweeting about climate change for those most at risk, called trusteeship—or follow—tweeting about climate change for those who are already concerned, called playing to the crowed—is examined. Results reveal that while Democrats generally tweet about climate change more often than Republicans, within each party, tweeting frequency is mostly explained by the level of concern in a politicians’ constituency. Objective risks faced by constituents play no role. Analysis of behavior across different office levels—federal, state, and local—also shows that while federal politicians are more partisan, state and local politicians play to the crowd to a greater degree. Analysis of the tweets shows the politicians’ unequal engagement leads to over-representations of some t...
An attribution occurs when an author quotes, paraphrases, or describes the statements and private... more An attribution occurs when an author quotes, paraphrases, or describes the statements and private states of a third party. Journalists use attribution to report statements and attitudes of public figures, organizations, and ordinary individuals. Properly recognizing attributions in context is an essential aspect of natural language understanding and implicated in many NLP tasks, but current resources are limited in size and completeness. We introduce the Political News Attribution Relations Corpus 2016 (PolNeAR)—the largest, most complete attribution relations corpus to date. This dataset greatly increases the volume of high-quality attribution annotations, addresses shortcomings of existing resources, and expands the diversity of publishers sourced. PolNeAR is built on news articles covering the political candidates during the year leading up to US Presidential Election in November of 2016. The dataset will support the creation of sophisticated end-to-end solutions for attribution ...
On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting h... more On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting has garnered much debate in context to the 2016 US Presidential Election. In pursuit of computational evaluation of news text, the statements (attributions) ascribed by media outlets to sources provide a common category of evidence on which to operate. In this paper, we develop an approach to compare partisan traits of news text attributions and apply it to characterize differences in statements ascribed to candidate, Hilary Clinton, and incumbent President, Donald Trump. In doing so, we present a model trained on over 600 in-house annotated attributions to identify each candidate with accuracy > 88%. Finally, we discuss insights from its performance for future research.
This study examines the impact of legitimacy on the dynamics of interorganizational networks with... more This study examines the impact of legitimacy on the dynamics of interorganizational networks within the nongovernmental organizations’ children’s rights community. The 27-year period of analysis included a critical community event: the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Building on theories of organizational evolution, hypotheses proposed that (1) ratification of the UNCRC served to codify and more broadly communicate the legitimate norms of the community, and (2) dissemination of normative information made it easier (a) for less experienced organizations to form and maintain partnerships, and (b) for organizations to form partnerships without reference to shared third-party contacts or dominant organizations. Data analysis via a longitudinal network model supported the hypotheses. Further investigation via an event history analysis suggested that these effects were largely confined to links among organizations in the children’s rights ...
Assessing Partisan Traits of News Text Attributions During the 2016 US Presidential Election, 2018
On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting h... more On the topic of journalistic integrity, the current state of accurate, impartial news reporting has garnered much debate in context to the 2016 US Presidential Election. In pursuit of computational evaluation of news text, the statements (attributions) ascribed by media outlets to sources provide a common category of evidence on which to operate. In this paper, we develop an approach to compare partisan traits of news text attributions and apply it to characterize differences in statements ascribed to candidate, Hilary Clinton, and incumbent President, Donald Trump. In doing so, we present a model trained on over 600 in-house annotated attributions to identify each candidate with accuracy > 88%. Finally, we discuss insights from its performance for future research.
This study proposes a rationale by which researchers can use network analysis tools to improve po... more This study proposes a rationale by which researchers can use network analysis tools to improve policies and guidelines for the formation of teams within a particular community. The study begins by defining voluntary collaborative project teams (VCPTs) as teams where members have semi-autonomous discretion over whether to join or participate.
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