Research

Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: A Natural Experiment on Wikipedia

Abstract: Open collaboration platforms have fundamentally changed the way knowledge is produced, disseminated and consumed. In these systems, contributions arise organically with little to no central governance. While such decentralization provides many benefits, a lack of broad oversight and coordination can leave questions of information poverty and skewness to the mercy of the system’s natural dynamics. Unfortunately, we still lack a basic understanding of the dynamics at play in these systems, and specifically, how contribution and attention interact and propagate through information networks.

How Media Ownership Impacts Information Skews: A Study of Televised News Using Massive-Scale Text Transcripts

Broadcast TV in the United States is an information system comprised of hundreds of local television stations that both produce their own information and syndicate information from other sources (such as major networks). In this system, a few media …

Media Coverage of Gun Violence in the United States

Gun violence in the United States has reached epidemic proportions, where guns have been implicated as the cause of more than 30,000 fatalities and 80,000 injuries annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American …