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CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar  (Seminar on People, Computers, and Design)

Fridays 12:30-1:50 · Gates B01 · Open to the public
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Matthew Salganik
Princeton University
Mass collaboration for social research in the digital age
January 29, 2016

The transition from the analog to digital age promises to dramatically improve our ability to conduct social science research. Currently, however, most "big data" social research uses digital exhaust, the traces of behavior that people leave behind during their everyday activities. Rather than focusing on the scraps that people leave behind, however, I think that more interesting research will come from using the tools of the digital age to collect new forms of data.

In this talk, I'll show how social scientists can use crowdsourcing, citizen science, and other forms of mass collaboration to collect and analyze social data in new ways. I'll describe three main categories of projects, and illustrate how they work with examples. Finally, the talk will conclude with a number of open questions and speculations about the future.

This event is co-sponsored by the Brown Institute.


Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office for Population Research, the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and computational social science. During the 2015-16 academic year, he will be Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech.

Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik's research is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Facebook, and Google.