Measuring Social Phenomena with Digital Behavioral Data

The next Leibniz Media Lecture will be hosted by the Hamburg Section of the Research Institute Social Cohesion. Prof. Dr. Claudia Wagner will talk about opportunities and challenges in measuring social phenomena with digital behavioral data. 

Dr. Gregor Wiedemann will provide the introduction. The event will be held in English.

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About the Lecture

Behavior and communication of people that is recorded via online platform, devices or dedicated software offers novel opportunities to gain insights into social phenomena. These data may even allow to measure and explain human attitudes and biases. However, several methodological challenges arise when working with observational digital behavioral data. In this talk Claudia Wagner will firstly focus on some of the issues that become apparent when we aim to measure and explain attitudes based on social media messages. She will present some work on assessing and addressing those measurement issues. Secondly Claudia Wagner will present a study that combines observational digital behavioral data with survey data to study perception biases of humans.

About the Speaker

Prof. Dr. Claudia Wagner is the chair for Applied Computational Social Sciences at RWTH Aachen University and the Scientific Director of the department Computational Social Science at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Before that, she was a W1 professor for Data Science at the University Koblenz-Landau and the team lead of team Data Science at GESIS that investigates social phenomena in offline and online social networks and social media. Wagner received her Ph.D. from the Graz University of Technology in 2013. Before that, she conducted several international research internships, among others at HP labs (Social Computation Lab), Xerox PARC (Augmented Social Cognition Lab), and the Open University (Knowledge Media Institute). To date, she has been awarded substantial research funding either as a PI or co-PI, was awarded a DOC-fFORTE fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and received four best paper awards at international conferences. She has published full papers in top tier conferences and high-impact journals.