Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at University Massachusetts – Amherst. I use computer codes to study the three-D problem on digital platforms. The 3 Ds are: discord, distrust, and dishonesty (and maybe I can throw in the 4th D here, which would be distraction).

Latest Publications & Projects

• My recent interviews with the New York Times on alt-tech
• My recent interviews with the Associated Press on alt-tech and Spotify’s Joe Rogan problem.
• Read my recent work on state-affiliated media
• Read my recent work on partisan news diffusion.
• Read my recent work on the Alt-right and Antifa and their collective actions on Twitter.
• Read my recent paper on online public spheres on Chinese Weibo.

Current research

• Currently leading the research group to study China’s Digital Public Diplomacy Operations during the COVID-19 Crisis. The research group is supported by the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) Network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder (NSF Award #1841338)
• Co-Investigator on a multi-national grant project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to study community responses to COVID-19.

Data projects

• I am building a visualization tracker for Twitter-based discourse concerning the Coronavirus outbreak.

Non-Academic Writings

I write a Substack called Opensource Soul Project https://opensourcesoul.substack.com/

What is CuriosityBits CC for?

I built this site to share open-source content created in my research and teaching. You will find interactive tutorials on using R to collect, analyze, and visualize social media data, copies to my recent publications, and a repository for past data visualization projects. Some of the content is also available on my old website (https://www.curiositybits.com/).