This panel will be composed of three speakers and will focus on work that links social science theory to social media data as it relates to inequality and health. Our goal for this panel is to bridge the work of data scientists with that of social scientists by bringing together experts who are utilizing new and exciting forms of data to talk about the opportunities and challenges of using these data to study fundamental questions within sociology pertaining to health. Each speaker will present their work in this area for approximately 20 to 25 minutes. There will be a moderator for questions at the end of the panel.
The speakers scheduled for this panel include:
Munmun De Choudhury is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and is affiliated with the GVU Center at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on making sense of human behavior as manifested via online social footprints. She is motivated by how the availability of large-scale online social data, coupled with computational methods and resources can help us answer fundamental questions relating to our social lives, particularly our health and well-being.
Ryan Light is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on social connectivity and social structure. To this end, he uses various tools from social network analysis and computational social science to tell stories about culture and inequality. He teaches classes on the sociology of culture, social theory, social networks, and research methods.
Ellis Monk is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His research interests include: racial categorization, classification, and stratification, political sociology, health, theory, the sociology of the body, social psychology and cognition, and Brazil. Additionally, he is deeply interested in Geometric Data Analysis (otherwise referred to as Multiple Correspondence Analysis).
Discussant: Hedwig Lee (Department of Sociology, University of Washington)