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We are pleased to announce that the fifth annual Politics and Computational Social Science (PaCSS) conference will take place in a hybrid format, June 16-18, 2022. Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) will host this year’s conference, with in-person events in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1730 Cambridge St, Cambridge, MA 02138). Register now at http://pacss.eventbrite.com.

Many thanks to our PaCSS 2022 sponsors: SAGE Publishing; The Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University; and Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

Schedule at a Glance

S010: Tsai AuditoriumS050S250
June 1611amWelcoming Remarks
11:30amMisinformationABMs and ElectionsPolnet Workshop, Shahryar Minhas (12-3)
1pmLunch
2pmMisinformation on Social MediaGender and Social Media
3:30pmBreak
3:45pmMisinformation ExperimentsDiversity and Equity
6pmInformal social gathering at Remnant Brewery
June 179am Control and ResistancePolitical CommunicationInnovations in Image Processing
10:30 amBreak
10:45amProtests and Social MediaPolitical AdvertisingData and Methods Innovations
12:15 pmLunch
1:30pmSocial Media and Collective ActionPolitical BehaviorPolnet Workshop, Sarah Shugars (1-4)
3pmBreak
3:15pmPolarizationAdvances in CSS
4:45pmNetworking
June 189amNLP Methods: Social MediaTwitterCongress
10:30amBreak
10:45amNLP MethodsRecommender SystemsCOVID-19: Networks and Polarization

THURSDAY, JUNE 16

Thursday, 11am EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Welcoming Remarks

Thursday, 11:30 am – 1pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Misinformation

View Recording

Effects of Associative Inference on Individuals’ Susceptibility to Misinformation
Aiping Xiong (she/her/hers), The Pennsylvania State University; Sian Lee, The Pennsylvania State University; Haeseung Seo, The Pennsylvania State University; Dongwon Lee, The Pennsylvania State University

Bad Science: Retractions, Citations and Media Coverage.
Eleonora Alabrese (she/her), University of Warwick

Engagement does not equal exposure: Examining proxies of viewership using Facebook’s URLs dataset
Jennifer Allen (she/her/hers), MIT; Duncan Watts, University of Pennsylvania; David Rothschild, Microsoft Research NY

The effect of campaign rallies on political misperceptions
Qin Li (she/her/hers), The Ohio State University; Dr. Robert Bond, Ohio State University; Kelly Garrett, Ohio State University, Erik Nisbet, Northwestern University

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Thursday, 11:30 am – 1pm EDT
Room S050: Agent-Based Models and Elections

A structural perspective on political polarization and segregation: the rise and fall of the extremists
Chen Liang (she/her/hers), MIT Sloan

Inferring the long-term voting blocs of municipalities through longitudinal referendum data
Jack O’Brien (he/him), Bowdoin College

Simulating instant runoff voting elections
Samuel Baltz (he/they), Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Games on Signed Graphs
Yuke Li (she/her/her), Peking University; A. S. Morse, Yale University

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Thursday, 12pm – 3pm EDT
Room S250: Virtual PolNet Workshop

Shahryar Minhas: Introduction to Latent Factor Models for Networks

This year’s PaCSS conference happens to coincide with a series of virtual workshops offered by the Political Networks Conference (PolNet). Since these workshops are likely to be of interest to PaCSS attendees, we’ve set some room aside for anyone wishing to attend these virtual workshops. For more information or to register (by June 10) please visit: https://conference.polinetworks.org/political-networks-conference/2022-workshops.

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Thursday, 2pm – 3:30pm
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Misinformation and Social Media

Disinformation Agents and Right-Leaning Visual Media
Cody Buntain (he/him/his), University of Maryland, College Park; Amogh Joshi, University of Maryland, InfEco Lab

Birds of a feather don’t fact-check each other: Partisanship and the evaluation of news in Twitter’s Birdwatch crowdsourced fact-checking program
Jennifer Allen (she/her/hers), Sloan School of Management, MIT; Cameron Martel, MIT; David Rand, MIT

Falsehood in, falsehood out: Measuring  exposure to elite misinformation on Twitter
Mohsen Mosleh (he/him/his), University of Exeter / MIT / Alan Turing; David Rand, MIT

Despair or Defiance? Turnout and Online Engagement with Election Misinformation
Stefan Mccabe (he/him/his), Northeastern University; Jon Green, Northeastern University; Will Hobbs, Cornell University; David Lazer, Northeastern University

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Thursday, 2pm – 3:30pm EDT
Room S050: Gender and Social Media
View Recording

The dynamics of online misogyny: Developing early linguistic warnings for online hate towards women
Aditi Dutta (she/her/hers), University of Exeter

Elite influence on anti-feminist hate speech online: A regression discontinuity approach
Chloe Ahn (she/her/hers), University of Pennsylvania

Partisan Media Coverage and Intersectionality: A Case Study of Vice President Kamala Harris
Rahul Bhargava (he/him/his), Northeastern University; Meg Heckman, Northeastern University; Emily Boardman Ndulue, Northeastern University

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Thursday, 3:45pm – 5:15pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Misinformation Experiments

View Recording

Estimating the persuasive returns to political microtargeting
Ben Tappin (he/him/his), MIT; Chloe Wittenberg, MIT; Luke Hewitt, MIT; Adam Berinsky, MIT; David Rand, MIT

Examining Partisan Asymmetries in Fake News Sharing and the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompt Interventions
Brian Guay (he/him/his), Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Adam Berinsky, MIT; Gordon Pennycook, U. Regina; David Rand, MIT

Can Instagram ads fight disinformation?
Debra Lavoy (she/her/hers), Reality Team

Encouraging News Consumption with Twitter Bots
Magdalena Wojcieszak (she/her/hers), UC Davis, University of Amsterdam; Hadi Askari, UC Davis; Anshuman Chhabra, UC Davis; Bernhard Clemm; University of Amsterdam; Xudong Yu, UC Davis; Michael Heseltine, American University; Ericka Menchen Trevino, American University; Zubair Shafiq, UC Davis

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Thursday, 3:45-5:15 pm EDT
Room S050: Diversity & Equity

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The Unequal Geography of Information: How Online Rental Housing Advertisements Affect Perceptions of Neighborhoods
John Kuk (he/him/his), University of Oklahoma; Max Besbris, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ariela Schachter, Washington University in St. Louis

Disparities in Telehealth Accessibility to Primary Care Physicians in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Lingbo Liu (he/him/his), Harvard University; Fahui Wang, Louisianan State University

Multilingual Parties
Taishi Muraoka (he/him/his), Academia Sinica; Dahjin Kim, Washington University in St. Louis; Christopher Lucas, Washington University in St. Louis; Jacob Montgomery, Washington University in St. Louis; Margit Tavits, Washington University in St. Louis

The speech we miss: How keyword based data collection obscures participation in online election discourse
Adina Gitomer (she/her), Northeastern University; Ryan J. Gallagher, Northeastern University; Sarah Shugars, New York University; Stefan McCabe, Northeastern University; David Lazer, Northeastern University; Brooke Foucault Welles, Northeastern University

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FRIDAY, JUNE 17

Friday, 9am – 10:30am EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Control and Resistance
View Recording

Protesting the Paradigm in Hong Kong
Giovanna Maria Dore (she/her/hers), The Johns Hopkins University; Arya D. McCarthy, The Johns Hopkins University

Internet Control As A Winning Strategy: How the Duality of Information Consolidates Autocratic Rule in the Digital Age
Meicen Sun, MIT

A Computational Analysis of Civil Resistance Dynamics and Outcomes
Soha Hammam (she/her/hers), Claremont Graduate University

Divergent Governance Patterns in Chinese Localities
Sarah Sklar (she/her/hers), Boston University

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Friday, 9am – 10:30am EDT
Room S050: Political Communication

View Recording

A multi-country computational analysis of press-state-online citizen relationship
Jean Dinco (She/Her/Hers)

Pandemic Communication: Evidence from a Presidential TV Show in Colombia
Jorge Gallego, Universidad del Rosario; Mateo Vasquez-Cortes (he/him/his), ITAM; Johan Ortega, Universidad del Rosario

Twitch Affordance and Political Communication in the streaming oriented platform
Sangyeon Kim (he/him/his), The Pennsylvania State University

It Is Not Just Fun and Games: An NLP Perspective on Signaling and the Intangible Legacy of the Olympics
Arya McCarthy (he/him/his), Johns Hopkins University; Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, Johns Hopkins University; Eva M.E. Klaus, Johns Hopkins University

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Friday, 9am – 10:30 am EDT
Room S250: Innovations in Image Processing
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Mapping Visual Themes among Authentic and Coordinated Memes
Keng-Chi Chang (he/him/his), University of California, San Diego

Introducing the Visual Conjoint, with an Application to Candidate Evaluation on Social Media
Kevin Munger (he/him/his), Penn State; Alessandro Vecchiato, Stanford University

A picture is worth a thousand words: machine-learning visual framing analysis
Seo Eun Yang (she/her/hers), Ohio State University

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Friday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Protests and Social Media
View Recording (Begins around 0:50:00)

Analyzing the mobilization strategies of Black Lives Matter activists on Twitter
Maneesh Arora (he/him/his), Wellesley College; Eni Mustafaraj, Wellesley College

From Social Media Consonance and Dissonance to Offline Confrontation in BLM Movement
Muheng Yan (he/him/his), University of Pittsburgh; Amy Chiang, University of California at San Francisco; Yu-Ru Lin, University of Pittsburgh

A Social Network Analysis of the Mobilization for and against the Istanbul Convention
Onur Bakiner (he/him/his), Seattle University

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Friday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
Room S050: Political Advertising

View Recording

The Face Mask as a Political Symbol in Campaign Advertisements
Jielu Yao (she/her/hers), Wesleyan University; Travis N. Ridout, Washington State University; Markus Neumann, Wesleyan University; Erika Franklin Fowler, Wesleyan University

Cross-Platform Emotions and Audience Engagement in Social Media Political Campaigning: Comparing Candidates’ Facebook and Instagram Images in the 2020 US Election
Michael Bossetta; Rasmus Siersbæk, University of Southern Denmark

Attribution, Rationales, and Annotation: An Analysis of US Presidential Campaigns on Facebook, 2017-2020
Musashi Harukawa (he/him/his), University of Oxford

Gradations of Negativity: Assessing Differences in Tone, Target and Type of Advertising on Facebook
Oliver Diamond (he/him/his), Wesleyan University; Noah Cohen, Wesleyan University; Oliver Diamond, Wesleyan University; Erika Franklin Fowler, Wesleyan University; Jielu Yao, Wesleyan University; Markus Neumann, Wesleyan University; Fiona Skerrett, Wesleyan University

Friday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
Room S250: Data and Methods Innovation
View Recording

Estimating the Accurate Numbers of Political Violence
Betul Ozturan (she/her/hers), Brandeis University

Assessing Affective Polarization Using the Text, Audio, and Video from In-Person, Telephone and Online Interviews
Bryce Dietrich (he/him/his), University of Iowa; Jeffery J. Mondak, University of Illinois; Tarah Williams, Allegheny College

Addressing Census data problems in race imputation via fully Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding and name supplements
Evan Rosenman (he/him/his), Harvard University; Santiago Olivella, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Kosuke Imai, Harvard University

What Does the Concept Mean? Communicating the Concept Structure of IRT Latent Variables
Josef Woldense (he/him/his), University of Minnesota; Matthew Wilson, University of South Carolina

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Friday, 1:30pm – 3pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Social Media and Collective Action
View Recording

Five Hundred Days of Farsi Twitter: Investigating the Iranian Twittersphere
Layla Hashemi (she/her/hers), George Mason University, TraCCC; Steven Wilson, Brandeis University; Constanza Sanhueza, Australian National University

The Transnational Diffusion of Social Movements: The Case of #MeToo
Hubert Au (He/Him/His), University of Oxford

Longitudinal Analysis of an Issue Influencer Communication Network: How Non-political Influencers and Regular Users Connectively Oppose a Contentious Gender Policy
Jack Lipei Tang (he/him/his), University of Southern California

Translation as anti-propaganda weapon? A first exploratory analysis of #TheGreatTranslationMovement on Twitter
Ryan Wang (he/him/his), Penn State University

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Friday, 1:30pm – 3pm EDT
Room S050: Political Behavior

View Recording

News localness and the consumption of digital local news (2017-2021)
Alvin Zhou (he/him/his), University of Minnesota; Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, University of Pennsylvania

The Political Mobilization of Scientists in the United States
Alexander Furnas (he/him/his), Northwestern University; Dashun Wang, Jian Gao, Yian Yin, Northwestern University

Using complex network analysis for periodization of post-colonial African history
Dmitry Zinoviev (he/him), Suffolk University

Mapping Philanthropy Dark Money with IRS 990 Forms
Louis Shekhtman (he/him/his), Northeastern University

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Friday, 1pm – 4pm EDT
Room S250: Virtual PolNet Workshop

Sarah Shugars, Methods at the Intersection of Network and Text Analysis

This year’s PaCSS conference happens to coincide with a series of virtual workshops offered by the Political Networks Conference (PolNet). Since these workshops are likely to be of interest to PaCSS attendees, we’ve set some room aside for anyone wishing to attend these virtual workshops. For more information or to register (by June 10) please visit: https://conference.polinetworks.org/political-networks-conference/2022-workshops.

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Friday, 3:15pm – 4:45pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: Polarization
View Recording

How Political News on Social Media Drives Affective Polarization
Christian Overgaard (he/him/his), The University of Texas at Austin 

Dynamics and functions of sharing partisan negativity online
Shengchun Huang, University of Pennsylvania; Yphtach Lelkes, University of Pennsylvania

Increasingly Liberal Partisan Cues from Corporate America: Evidence from 1 Million Social Media Posts
Soubhik Barari (he/him/his), Harvard University

How negative and uncivil language on Facebook affect partisan polarization in the American public
Yujin Kim (she/her/hers), University of Texas at Austin

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Friday, 3:15pm – 4:45pm EDT
Room S050: Advances in Computational Social Science

View Recording (begins around 1:40:00)

My network, myself? Comparing digital trace and self-reported measures of network-level partisan bias
Katherine Haenschen (she/her/hers), Northeastern University

How Video Cameras in Courtrooms Reshape Judicial Proceedings
Aaron Kaufman (he/him/his), New York University Abu Dhabi; Jeffrey Tumminia, New York University; Brian McFee, New York University; Michael Picheny, New York University

A Deep Learning Model for Ideology Prediction across Multiple Genres of Text
Nick Beauchamp, Northeastern University; Lu Wang, University of Michigan; Frederick Zhang, University of Michigan; Yujian Liu, University of Michigan; David Wegsman, University of Michigan

Understanding park-based health-promoting behavior using large-scale social media data
Tianyu Su (he/him/his), Harvard University; Maoran Sun, Senseable City Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Friday, 4:45pm EDT
Networking Session

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SATURDAY, JUNE 18

Saturday, 9am – 10:30am EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: NLP Methods: Social Media

Twitter Opinion Barometer on Turkish-American Relations
Yunus Emre Tapan (he/him/his), Northeastern University; Burak Ozturan, Northeastern University; Saban Kardas, TOBB ETU University of Economics and Technology; Mucahid Kutlu, TOBB ETU University of Economics and Technology

Studying Personally Expressed Political Identity at Scale (paper)
Jason Jones, Stony Brook University

Bilingual Reporting on Social Media: Measuring the quality of user discourse in Spanish- and English-language
Lea Hellmueller (she/her/hers), City, University of London (UK); Lindita Camaj, University of Houston (USA); Sebastián Vallejo Vera, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico)

WordPPR: A New Keyword Selection Method for Social Media Data Retrieval
Yini Zhang (she/her/hers), University at Buffalo; Fan Chen, Jiyoun Suk & Zoey Yue

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Saturday, 9am – 10:30am
Room S050: Twitter: Attention, Amplification, and Following Behavior

View Recording

Who follows Whom on Twitter: The role of geography and ideology
Zhen Guo, Northeastern University; Alexi Quintana Mathe (he/him/his), Northeastern University; David Lazer, Northeastern University; Stefan McCabe, Northeastern University; Nir Grinberg, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Kenny Joseph, University at Buffalo; Jon Green, Northeastern University

Attentional Cat-pital: Analyzing the Accrual and Spread of Latent Attention on Twitter
Alyssa Smith (she/her/hers), Northeastern University

Twitter as a news space
Galen Stocking (he/him/his), Pew Research Center; Elisa Shearer, Pew Research Center

Political posting and following behavior by US adults on Twitter
Sono Shah (he/him/his), Pew Research Center; Samuel Bestvater, Pew Research  Center; Gonzalo Rivero, Pew Research Center; Aaron Smith, Pew Research Center

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Saturday, 9am – 10:30am EDT
Room S250: Congress
View Recording

Named-Entity Recognition with Application to Foreign Leader Mentions in Congressional Speeches
Ashrakat Elshehawy , University of Oxford & Yale University; Ines Rehbein, University of Mannheim; Nikolay Marinov, University of Houston; Federico Nanni, Alan Turing Institute

Dyadic Representation in Canadian Parliament
Callandra Moore (she/her/hers), University of Toronto

Mapping political networks within parliaments using Twitter user lists: Insights from the German Bundestag
Harald Meier, Social Media Research Foundation

Measuring Polarization in US Congress Discourse with Machine Learning Methods
Jack Felag (he/him/his), Binghamton University; Rion Brattig Correia, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Binghamton University; Luis Rocha, Binghamton University, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência

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Saturday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
S010, Tsai Auditorium: NLP Methods

Using News Embeddings to Estimate Economic and Political Indexes
Benjamin Steel (he/him/his), McGill University; Dr. Derek Ruths, McGill University

Coding Social Science Text Using Language Models
Christopher Rytting, Brigham Young University; Lisa Argyle (she/her/hers), Brigham Young University; Ethan Busby, Nancy Fulda, Joshua Gubler, Christopher Rytting, Taylor Sorensen, David Wingate, Brigham Young University

Measuring morality in text: A new, embedding-based dictionary
Maurits van der Veen (he/him/his), William & Mary

Political Theory, Creativity, and Text-as-Data
Emma Rodman (she/her/hers), Princeton University

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Saturday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
Room S050: Recommender Systems

View Recording

How personalizing algorithms on digital media platforms affect public opinion, voter turnout, and voting behavior
Alessandro Vecchiato (he/him), Stanford University; Andrea De Angelis, University of Lucerne, Alexander Trechsel, University of Lucerne

Ideological Trajectories in Recommendation Systems for News Consumption
Cody Buntain (he/him/his), University of Maryland, College Park

YouTube, “The Great Radicalizer”? Auditing and Mitigating Ideological Biases in YouTube Recommendations
Muhammad Haroon (he/him/his), UC Davis; Anshuman Chhabra, UC Davis; Xin Liu, UC Davis; Prasant Mohapatra, UC Davis; Zubair Shafiq, UC Davis; Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis

Exposure to Radical Content on YouTube:  Algorithmic Recommendations or Off-platform Factors?
Rong-Ching Chang, UC Davis; Rong-Ching Chang, UC Davis; Ericka Menchen-Trevino, American University; Zubair Shafiq, UC Davis; Magdalena Wojcieszak, UC Davis

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Saturday, 10:45am – 12:15pm EDT
Room S250: Covid-19: Networks and Polarization

COVID-19 Vaccine Information Ecosystem on Turkish Twittersphere
Burak Ozturan (he/him/his), Northeastern University

Americans together but politically apart: Social networks in COVID-19 America
Byungkyu Lee, Indiana University; Kangsan Lee, NYU Abu Dhabi; Benjamin Hartman, Indiana University

COVID-19 and Right-Wing Populism: A Push to the Extreme?
Felix Hageneister (he/him/his), TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology; Ranjit Lall, London School of Economics; Thomas R. Davidson, Rutgers University

Analysis of News Media Coverage Before and After the March 2020 Nationwide Lockdown in India
Shagun Gupta (she/her/hers), American University

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Registration Information

Register now at http://pacss.eventbrite.com. We are dedicated to keeping this conference open and accessible. Our registration fees help cover the cost of the event and we have worked hard to keep these fees as low as possible: $100 for in-person faculty attendance, $50 for in-person graduate student attendance and $20 for all online only attendance. If you would like to request a registration waiver — particularly for online attendence — we ask that you email us at politics.css@gmail.com.

To aid the affordability of in-person attendance, a limited number of dorm rooms will be made available at Simmons University. All rooms will be singles equipped with AC and costing $70/night. Please select all nights you wish to book when registering. Note that dorms must be reserved by Wednesday, June 1 at the latest.

About PaCSS

The data and methodologies available to social scientists have exploded with the emergence of archives of digital data collection, large scale online experimentation, and innovative uses of simulation. The analysis of these data requires more complex methodological approaches and greater computational complexity than the approaches that have dominated the study of politics for the last 50 years.

The emergence of novel data sources offers the potential for rich insights into society at scale, but it also introduces new ethical and infrastructural challenges. In parallel, the information and communication technologies that have driven this data revolution are also driving changes in politics, around the world, that require study.

In order to understand the political world, it is increasingly important to gain access to the political communication and behavior occurring online. PaCSS, started in 2018 with about 150 attendees, offers a forum for computational social science research in this emerging space. Examples of relevant topics/approaches include: analysis of social media; text analysis; use of finely granular geographic data; and large scale online experimentation. Deeply committed to elevating the voices and work of populations which are underrepresented in computational spaces, PaCSS actively seek, welcome, and encourage people from all fields, industries, backgrounds, experiences, and identities to submit their work and attend. 

PaCSS 2022 is co-chaired by David Lazer and Sarah Shugars, with support from Stefan McCabe, Burak Ozturan, Alexi Quintana, Alyssa Smith, Ata Uslu, and Allison Wan.

Many thanks to our PaCSS 2022 sponsors SAGE Publishing; The Massive Data Institute at Georgetown University; and Northeastern’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks.

Please email politics.css@gmail.com with any questions.

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