Wednesday, September 25, 2019 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

Computational communication research is an emerging research approach. It aims to describe, explain, and predict human’s communication behaviors and their driving mechanism with the availability of online behavioral data (e.g., server log analytics, web scraping, online archiving/indexing data, and mass online experiment) and computational methods (e.g., social network analysis, text mining, spatial analysis, and temporal analysis). Jonathan Zhu is a leading scholar in computational communication research. In the present dialogue, he described the conceptual, methodological, and technological profiles of computational communication research, through his first-hand observations. He also reflected his personal experience in pursuing research in this interdisciplinary area as a trained social scientist and a bridge with computing and data science, and pinpointed the opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls in this research approach in the future.