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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.

CDSC members at the CDSC group retreat in September 2024 in West Lafayette. 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.

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 Courses

[Winter 2025] Organizing and Governance in Online Communities (UW COM597 Winter 2025) — A "special topics" seminar and reading group for PhD students and research-focused masters students that focuses on "classics" of organizational theory and applications of these concepts to understanding online communities.

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:

Community Dialogue on The Role of Community Governance: Join the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) for our 11th Science of Community Dialogue! This Community Dialogue will take place on April 4th at 12:00 pm CT. This Dialogue focuses on resisting online information manipulation and the role of community governance. Professor Paul Gowder (Northwestern University) will join Zarine Kharazian (University of Washington) to present recent research on topics including: A full session descriptions is …
Continue reading "Community Dialogue on The Role of Community Governance"; — madisondeyo 2025-03-19

The Relationship Between Facebook and Tradition or How a Peacock Invaded a Garden: A question that’s been bugging me for the past months is how a digital medium can amplify remnants of traditional pre-modern life. I’m only a recent addition to the Collective and, despite thinking a lot about digitality and how it affects social processes, I’ve only marginally been part of online communities myself. However, living back …
Continue reading "The Relationship Between Facebook and Tradition or How a Peacock Invaded a Garden"; — lbitsiko 2025-03-17

Decentralization and the social web revisited

— Aaron Shaw http://aaronshaw.org 2025-02-27

Exit, Voice, and Fork: From One Community to a Network of Groups: Everyone knows that making friends can be a bit daunting as a new student (especially international or if you’re not from the area). With that in mind, a while after I arrived in Chicago to begin my PhD program last Fall, a Brazilian friend and I made a Northwestern WhatsApp group for international graduate students! …
Continue reading "Exit, Voice, and Fork: From One Community to a Network of Groups"; — thaty 2025-01-18

Thinking about AI harms to communities? Submit to our upcoming 4S Panel!: We advocate for consideration of harms to communities (including online communities) as they respond to, are used for, and incorporate generative AI algorithms. One area of risk is one we call ‘Social Model Collapse,’ the notion that changes to community dynamics — social and technical — can disrupt the fundamental processes they rely on to …
Continue reading "Thinking about AI harms to communities? Submit to our upcoming 4S Panel!"; — kaylea 2025-02-01