Research
Technology ⋆ Inequality ⋆ Activism ⋆ Information ⋆ Digital Data
Current Projects
Active Info
With Jen Schradie (Sciences Po)
More soon!
Book Bans in Political Context: Evidence from US Public Schools
With Katie Spoon (U Colorado Boulder), Jack LaViolette (Columbia), and Marcelo Silva (Duke)
Under Review
In the 2021–2022 school year, more books were banned in U.S. school districts than in any previous year. Book banning and other forms of information censorship have serious implications for democratic processes, and censorship has become a central theme of partisan political rhetoric in the United States. However, there is little empirical work on the exact content, predictors of, and efficacy of this rise in book bans. Using a comprehensive dataset of 2,532 bans that occurred during the 2021–2022 school year from PEN America, combined with county-level administrative data, multiple book-level digital trace datasets, restricted-use book sales data, and a novel crowd-sourced dataset of author demographic information, we find that (i) banned books are disproportionately written by people of color and feature characters of color, both fictional and historical, in children’s books; (ii) counties that have become less conservative over time are more likely to ban books than neighboring counties; and (iii) national levels of interest in books are largely unaffected after they are banned. Together, these results suggest that rather than serving as an effective censorship tactic, book banning in this recent U.S. context, targeted at low-interest children’s books featuring diverse characters, is more similar to a symbolic political action to galvanize shrinking voting blocs.
This project is funded by a grant from the Social Science Research Council.
Gender Inequality in the Open Science Movement
Stemming from my dissertation work, I have two articles that emprically examine gender gaps in the Open Science movement. The first looks specifically at the field of communication while the second looks at the movement leaders who have published work in some way advocating for Open Science practices or related changes in the field.
Gender Gaps in Communication’s Open Science Movement
With Mia Jovanova (UPenn)
Under Review
Communication scholarship is increasingly adopting Open Science (OS) practices: sharing code and data, pre-registering studies, and conducting replications. Yet, scholars have also critiqued how the OS movement might create barriers and exacerbate inequalities. As the field aims to better support a more diverse body of scholars, it is imperative to understand who participates in OS. In this pre-registered study, we look at one important area of inequality, author gender, among rates of articles that adopt OS practices versus articles unaffiliated with OS practices. Using computational methods, we categorize author gender and use of OS practices across 4,561 quantitative communication articles. We find prevalent gender gaps, such that women are significantly less likely to lead, and co-author, papers that adopt OS practices relative to papers unaffiliated with OS. These gender gaps are unexplained by journal-level differences or publication year. Our results highlight a tension between the aims of the OS movement and efforts to increase inclusivity in the field. A commitment to truly open science requires a commitment to solving participation gaps. Our work aims to spark a conversation towards better, and more equitable, communication research.
We presented this work at ICA 2022 in Paris, France (Computational Methods Division). You can find our pre-registration here.
Gender Gaps in the Open Science Movement: Participation, Citation, Collaboration
Under Review
The Open Science movement has become a rising force within the social sciences in the past decade, working to establish and institutionalize more responsible research practices and building a suite of digital tools that help scientists register, access, and share work at each stage of the scientific process. Yet for all the needed reform offered by the Open Science movement, strong critiques have emerged, particularly around how the community and tools built by Open Science advocates works to exclude certain researchers, often those who belong to specific race and gender demographics. Assembling a sample of over 3,000 published articles about the movement or its practices, I investigate rates of gender inequality within the Open Science movement. I identify and quantify a gender gap among (1) published authors, (2) within citations, and (3) within the co-authorship network. Additionally, using simulated co-authorship networks, I gauge the effects citing more women, a common recommendation from the citational justice movement, would have for gender equity within the Open Science movement. This work sheds light on the development and growth of Open Science within the social sciences and provides empirical evidence of gender gaps in participation and citation.
Dissertation Project
The Irony of Openness: Gender Inequality in Self-Governed Knowledge Systems
Open knowledge technologies are in many ways the backbone of the Internet, providing reliable information and tools for millions of people every day, often without their awareness. Yet across sites of open knowledge technologies, gender gaps persist and exceed the rates of gender inequality in more closed systems of knowledge production. I deem this pattern the irony of openness. To connect across a range of endeavors I construct a definition of openness applicable to a range of products and participation types. Using a framework of self-governance, I identify the complex set of traits and practices that produce openness and in turn determine the quality of our informational tools and content. Using digital trace data from the processes of knowledge production across three case studies –Wikipedia, Open Source Software, and the Open Science Movement – I both identify repeating forms of gender inequality and evaluate activists attempts to intervene and produce more equitable knowledge. My results indicate both profound gender gaps and document the difficult work of creating change in the governance of open knowledge technologies.
Selected Publications
The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions (2022)
Journal of Communication
with Sandra González-Bailón
Paper here
Video presentation here
Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements intervene to try to close existing gaps? Through a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, we provide an evaluation of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract gender inequality within digital information projects. We find that the interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of that content. This leads us to argue for a more granular and cumulative analysis of gender gaps in collaborative environments. We also discuss the implications for future scholarship on digital inequalities.
Protest Networks, Mobilization, and Resilience Book Chapter (2023)
Social Networks & Social Resilience edited by T.A.B.Snijders, E.Lazega & R.Wittek. – with Sandra González-Bailón
Available here
The movement Black Lives Matter has spurred massive, international protests since it first emerged around the eponymous Twitter hashtag in 2013. Social network analysis is well primed to answer questions around how movements like BLM gain traction, create or change story frames, enact policy change, and mobilize supporters, both online and offline. Using BLM as an exemplar, this chapter reviews research about the movement that uses network approaches to understand its emergence, growth, and resilience, especially as it enters its second decade and contends with counter movements. More generally, the chapter offers a discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with incorporating social media data to the analysis of resilience as it manifests in the growth of networked social movements.