Department of Communication | North Dakota State University
<aside> 💡 Announcements & News
NDSU will host the NDSU-SICSS Summer Institute in Computational Social Science for a third consecutive year in June, 2024. SICSS brings together researchers from the region and across the country for hands-on learning about areas of computational social science: working with APIs, doing social network analysis, deploying sentiment taggers, processing natural language, setting up deep learning architectures, and more. In its inaugural year (2022), NDSU was only one of seven U.S. sites and one of 32 global sites to host a SICSS Summer Institute. More information — including a link to the application — will be posted under Meetings & Workshops soon.
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The digital trace data Lab ($d\!\curlyeqprec^t_d$Lab) launched in January of 2023 as a home for computational social science research that involves the use of digital trace data. Digital trace data are the data between the lines: information — and ways of framing information — that appears to be peripheral but can have a real impact on how people communicate, make decisions, and understand the world around them.
Housed in NDSU’s Department of Communication, research in the $d\!\curlyeqprec^t_d$Lab studies communication contexts where complex information — around issues like climate change, health and medicine, or financial disclosures — circulates in and across discursive systems. In our research, we use tools and methods from deep learning-based language modeling, computational rhetoric, and traditional NLP. Our goals are to facilitate and promote research using digital trace data; bring together faculty, graduate students, and other interested researchers to collaborate on such projects; and serve as a resource for NDSU researchers who want to integrate digital trace data or computational social science methods into their own research programs.
Lab Director
Zoltan P. Majdik, Ph.D.
Affiliated Graduate Students
Emmanuel M. Dadzie
Recent Publications & Presentations
Resources for Trace Data Research
M$^2$APD (Mapping Metaphors Across Public Discourses)
Medical Misinformation Classifier Development
AI/LLM Rhetorical Norms Alignment | Deliberative Norms Alignment