As a scholar, I study public opinion and consumer behavior by investigating large amounts of data. I test social science theory using methods from computer science, such as text mining, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning and topic modeling. My research focuses on how people interact with news media and strategic communication on a large scale. My emergent research suggests that contextual data can work in concert with social science theory to explain how people behave online. The more we understand trends and tendencies of large audiences and their aggregate behaviors, the better our tactics as advertisers and public relations practitioners can become.
keywords
big data, computational social science, agenda-setting theory, social media, consumer engagement, marketing analytics, advertising analytics
