Community Data Science Collective

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

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.

The group is led by Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw.

My Chair

I realize that because I have several chairs, the phrase “my chair” is ambiguous. To reduce confusion, I will refer to the head of my academic department as “my office chair” going forward.

— Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc 2024-09-17

For Additional Confusion

The Wikipedia article on antipopes can be pretty confusing! If you’d like to be even more confused, it can help with that!

— Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc 2024-08-10

The Financial Times has been printing an obvious error on its “Market Data” page for 18 months and nobody else seems to have noticed

If you’ve flipped through printed broadsheet newspapers, you’ve probably seen pages full of tiny text listing prices and other market information for stocks and commodities. And you’ve almost certainly just turned the page. Anybody interested in this market prices today will turn to the internet where these numbers are available in real time and where …

Continue reading "The Financial Times has been printing an obvious error on its “Market Data” page for 18 months and nobody else seems to have noticed"

— Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc 2022-12-03

The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts

Should online communities require people to create accounts before participating? This question has been a source of disagreement among people who start or manage online communities for decades. Requiring accounts makes some sense since users contributing without accounts are a common source of vandalism, harassment, and low quality content. In theory, creating an account can …

Continue reading "The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts"

— Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc 2021-11-09