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The Community Data Science Collective is an interdisciplinary research group made up of faculty and students at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the Carleton College Computer Science Department, and the Purdue University School of Communication.

CDSC members at the CDSC group retreat in October 2022 in Seattle. In a spiral starting from the top: Mako, Carl, Jeremy, Nick, Salt, Hazel, Yibin, Regina, Kaylea, Ellie, Aaron, Floor, Sohyeon, Molly, Emilia, Ryan, Charlie, Dyuti. Check out our other group photos!

We are social scientists applying a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of online communities. We seek to understand both how and why some attempts at collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities and high quality work products.

Our research is particularly focused on how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like an individual’s decision to join a community, contribute to a public good, or a group’s ability to make decisions democratically.

Our research is deeply interdisciplinary, most frequently consists of “big data” quantitative analyses, and lies at the intersection of communication, sociology, and human-computer interaction.

Courses

In addition to research, we teach classes and run workshops. Some of that work is coordinated on this wiki. A more detailed lists of workshops and teaching material on this wiki is on our Workshops and Classes page. In this page, we only list ongoing classes and workshops.

Purdue Courses

[Fall 2022] Communication and Social Networks (COM 411, Fall 2022) – This class focuses on understanding how the structure of relationships between people influence communication patterns and behavior. This perspective can help us to understand a broad set of phenomena, from online communities to friendships to businesses. The course will also introduce students to using network visualizations to gain and share insights about network phenomena. Taught by Jeremy Foote.

[Fall 2022] Intro to Programming and Data Science (COM 674, Fall 2022) Taught by Jeremy Foote.

University of Washington Courses

[Winter 2023] COM 481: Online Communities — A course on online communities taught by Kaylea Champion.

Public Data Science Workshops

Click here for details and to sign up for announcements about upcoming Community Data Science Workshops in Seattle.

Community Data Science Workshops — The Community Data Science Workshops (CDSW) are a series of workshops designed to introduce some of the basic tools of programming and analysis of data from online communities to absolute beginners. The CDSW have been held six times in Seattle between 2014 and 2020. So far, more than 100 people have volunteered their weekends to teach more than 500 people to program in Python, to build datasets from Web APIs, and to ask and answer questions using these data.

Research Resources

If you are a member of the collective, perhaps you're looking for CommunityData:Resources which includes details on email, TeX templates, documentation on our computing resources, etc.

About This Wiki

This is open to the public and hackable by all but mostly contains information that will be useful to collective members, their collaborators, people enrolled in their projects, or people interested in building off of their work. If you're interested in making a change or creating content here, generally feel empowered to Be Bold. If things don't fit, somebody who watches this wiki will be in touch.

This is mostly a normal MediaWiki although there are a few things to know:

There's a CAPTCHA enabled. If you create an account and then contact any collective member with the username (on or off wiki), they can turn the CAPTCHA off for you.
Extension:Math is installed so you can write math here. Basically you just add math by putting TeX inside <math> tags like this: <math>\frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}}</math> and it will write ${\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {n}}}$ .

Research News

Follow us as @comdatasci on Twitter and @communitydata@social.coop in the Fediverse/Mastodon and subscribe to the Community Data Science Collective blog.

Recent posts from the blog include:

Announcing the Community Dialogue on Accountable Governance: Join the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) for our 4th Science of Community Dialogue! This Community Dialogue will take place on January 20 at 10:00 PT (18:00 UTC) . This Dialogue focuses on community governance and data. Professor Amy X. Zhang (University of Washington) will join Dr. Nick Vincent (Northwestern University, UC Davis) to cover …
Continue reading "Announcing the Community Dialogue on Accountable Governance"; — mollydb 2023-01-12

Of Vikings, Barbie, and ‘The Wealth of Networks’: In The Wealth Of Networks, Yochai Benkler describes the opportunities and decisions presented by networked forms of production. Writing in the mid-2000s, Benkler describes a wide range of future policy battlegrounds: copyrights and patents, common carrier infrastructure, the accessibility of the public sphere, and the verification of information. Benkler predicts: “How these battles turn out over …
Continue reading "Of Vikings, Barbie, and ‘The Wealth of Networks’"; — kaylea 2022-12-04

CDSC students, courses, & (award winning!) instructors featured by Wiki Education: Wiki Education (a.k.a., WikiEdu) is an independent non-profit organization that promotes the integration of Wikipedia into education and classrooms. In pursuit of this mission, WikiEdu has created incredible resources for students and instructors, including tools that facilitate classroom assignments where students create and improve Wikipedia articles. In courses at both Northwestern and the University of …
Continue reading "CDSC students, courses, & (award winning!) instructors featured by Wiki Education"; — Aaron Shaw http://aaronshaw.org 2022-12-06

Community Dialogue: Informal Learning: We had another Science of Community Dialogue! This most recent one was themed around informal learning, talking about communities as informal learning spaces and the sorts of tools and habits communities can adopt to help learners, mentors, and newcomers. We had presentations from Ruijia (Regina) Cheng (University of Washington, CDSC) and Dr. Denae Ford Robinson …
Continue reading "Community Dialogue: Informal Learning"; — mollydb 2022-11-30

Mapping the many pathways of learning in online communities: Thousands of widely used online communities are designed to promote learning. Although some rely on formal educational approaches like lesson plans, curriculum, and tests, many of the most successful learning communities online are structured as what scholars call a community of practice (CoP). In CoPs, members mentor and apprentice with each other (both formally and …
Continue reading "Mapping the many pathways of learning in online communities"; — Ruijia "Regina" Cheng 2022-11-16