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The Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) 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, the School of Information at UT Austin and the Purdue University School of Communication.
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.
To learn more about the CDSC, please check out our about page (especially the links there). Prospective students should also review these materials.
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 2024] Intro to Programming and Data Science (COM 674, Fall 2024) Taught by Jeremy Foote.
- [Fall 2024] Communication and Social Networks (Fall 2024) Taught by Jeremy Foote
University of Washington | Bothell Courses
- [Fall 2025] CSS360: Software Engineering — Surveys the software engineering processes, tools, and techniques used in software development and quality assurance. Taught by Kaylea Champion.
University of Washington | Seattle Courses
- [Spring 2025] COM528: Designing Internet Research — A MA/PhD class offering a survey of several Internet research methods taught by Benjamin Mako Hill.
Public Data Science Workshops
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.
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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:
- Join us at FOSSY 2025!
- Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS? Join us July 31st – August 3rd at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference! We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 1st and Saturday August 2nd. We’re excited to have …
- — madisondeyo 2025-07-10
- Niche Dynamics in Complex Online Community Ecosystems (ICWSM 2025)
- This post is about my (Nathan TeBlunthuis) paper (pdf) just published at ICWSM 2025. Often, several different online communities exist where similar people talk about similar things. This is really easy to observe from browsing platforms like Reddit or Facebook groups. For example, as we can see from this visualization of clustered subreddits with overlapping …
Continue reading "Niche Dynamics in Complex Online Community Ecosystems (ICWSM 2025)"
- — Nate TeBlunthuis 2025-06-28
- Come check out the CDSC at ICA 75!
- A number of our CDSC folks will be attending the 75th Annual International Communication Association Conference “Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research” in Denver, Colorado from June 12th to June 16th this year. Below, you can find the schedule of where our CDSC members will be: Friday 10:30 – 11:45, HIGH-DENSITY: Advances and Best Practices in …
- — madisondeyo 2025-06-19
- Kaylea Champion Receives Dissertation Awards
- CDSC member Kaylea Champion’s dissertation, “Social and Technical Sources of Risk in Sustaining Digital Infrastructure,” has been selected for two awards: the 2025 Annie Lang Dissertation Award from the International Communication Association Information Systems Division, and the 2025 Faculty Award for Outstanding Research – Ph.D. Dissertation Award from the Department of Communication University of Washington. …
Continue reading "Kaylea Champion Receives Dissertation Awards"
- — Community Data Science Collective https://communitydata.cc/ 2025-06-12
- New Research Brief: Online Community Resilience and Attacks on Public Information Goods
- Throughout their lifecycles, the online communities that steward public information goods can face a range of threats to their sustainability. Over the course of its existence, Wikipedia, one of the most visible online knowledge commons, has battled the following challenges: At our 11th Science of Community Dialogue on April 4th, which featured a conversation with …
- — Zarine Kharazian http://zarine.net 2025-06-09
