15. Race in Computational Disinformation Analysis and Deep Reading with Deen Freelon

Our guest in this episode is Deen Freelon, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina in the School of Journalism and Media. We chat about his 2020 Social Science Computer Review Paper "Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation" with co-authors Michael Bossetta, Chris Wells, Josephine Lukito, Yiping Xia, and Kirsten Adams.

Deen also talks about writing a "behind the scenes" book chapter about the process of making this paper, being one of the first movers in the discipline of computational methods for communication studies, and how he learns programming best when it is connected to the goals of his project. He emphasizes that many of his great research ideas come from reading deeply and recommends devoting at least half a day a week solely to reading.

Om Podcasten

Large-scale data has become a major component of research about human behavior and society. But how are interdisciplinary collaborations that use large-scale social data formed and maintained? What obstacles are encountered on the journey from idea conception to publication? In this podcast, we investigate these questions by probing the “research diaries” of scholars in computational social science and adjacent fields. We unmask the research process with the hope of normalizing the challenges of and increasing accessibility in academia. Music: Jon Gillick.