I'm Nate (he/they)!
I am an assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I was previously a postdoctoral research fellow in the Information School at the University of Michigan and before that at the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. I completed my PhD in Communication at the University of Washington where I was advised by Benjamin Mako Hill.
I am a computational social scientist who studies online collective action in projects like Wikipedia, online communities like Reddit, and social movements. My website is teblunthuis.cc.
Many people invoke "ecosystem" as metaphor to emphasize complexity and interdependence in communication systems like the Internet. However, there is also a huge natural science called "ecology" which successfully learns about biological ecosystems. Organizational sociologists and communication scientists have already appropriated theories, models and methods from ecology to understand interdependence between human organizations like firms and social movements. I draw both from these social science literatures and from bio-ecology to understand how environmental contexts and interdependence between online communities shapes their growth, survival and organizing processes. My master's thesis (with Mako and Aaron) applied this approach using topic models to study competition between online petitions.
I grew up in Eastern Washington, where I worked in a glass Laboratory at PNNL where I contributed to a number of material science papers. I went to college at Whitworth University where I received a double-B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2012. As an undergrad I was part of a humble bioinformatics research group and contributed to research in structured search engines. After this I worked at Microsoft for a couple of years where I did a number of small things mainly related to search suggestions for Bing multimedia. After this I briefly worked as a data science consultant in medical informatics.
I care deeply about the free software and free culture movements. I've been using Linux for 10 years and I support the free software community as a member of the free software foundation. I've been coding for 21 years and a Linux user for 16 years. I also contribute to Wikipedia.
My main hobbies are skiing, rock climbing, guitar playing, listening to music, and cooking. I'm married to Amanda, a family physician, and we have a beautiful daughter.
