People

Principal Researchers

Deen Freelon

@dfreelon   HOMEPAGE

Deen Freelon is an Associate Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. His research covers two major areas of scholarship: 1) political expression through digital media and 2) data science and computational methods for analyzing large digital datasets. He has authored or co-authored more than 30 journal articles, book chapters, and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. He has served as principal investigator on grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. He has extensive experience in computational methods for social science research, including text preprocessing, computational description, network analysis, machine learning, and open-source research software development. He has written research-grade software to calculate intercoder reliability for content analysis (ReCal), analyze large-scale network data from social media (TSM), and collect data from Facebook (fb_scrape_public).

Daniel Kreiss

@kreissdaniel   HOMEPAGE

Daniel Kreiss is an Associate Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016) charts the emergence of a data-driven, personalized, and socially-embedded form of campaigning and explains differences in technological adoption between the two U.S. political parties. Kreiss is an affiliated fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and received a PhD in Communication from Stanford University.

Alice E. Marwick

@alicetiara   HOMEPAGE

Alice E. Marwick is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Faculty Affiliate at the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy, and Faculty Advisor to the Media Manipulation Initiative at the Data & Society Research Institute. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. In 2017, she co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online, a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of 2017’s Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene that examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and is co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017). Her current book project examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status.

Zeynep Tufekçi

@zeynep    HOMEPAGE

Zeynep Tufekci is an Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. She was previously an Andrew Carnegie Fellow and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and regularly writes columns for the New York Times, WIRED, and Scientific American. Her book, Twitter and Teargas: The Ecstatic, Fragile Politics of Networked Protest in the 21st Century (Yale 2018), examines the dynamics, strengths, and weaknesses of 21^st  century social movements. Originally from Turkey, and formerly a computer programmer, she became interested in the social impacts of technology and began to focus on how digital and computational technology interact with social, political, and cultural dynamics. She has become a go-to source for media outlets looking for insights on the impact of social media and the growing influence of machine algorithms. She has given three TED Talks and frequently delivers keynote addresses at academic and tech conferences.

Senior Faculty Researchers

Tressie McMillan Cottom

@tressiemcphd  HOMEPAGE

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an award-winning author, professor, and sociologist, whose work has earned national and international recognition for the urgency and depth of its incisive critical analysis of technology, higher education, class, race, and gender. She is an Associate Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. McMillan Cottom earned her doctorate from Emory University’s Laney Graduate School in sociology in 2015. Her dissertation research formed the foundation for her first book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press 2016). With hundreds of thousands of readers amassed over years of writing and publishing, McMillan Cottom’s columns have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Dissent Magazine. Her most recent book, THICK: And Other Essays (The New Press 2019), is a critically acclaimed Amazon best-seller that situates Black women’s intellectual tradition at its center. THICK won the Brooklyn Public Library’s 2019 Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 National Book Award in nonfiction.

Shannon McGregor

@shannimcg  HOMEPAGE

Shannon McGregor is an Assistant Professor in the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. Her research addresses the role of social media and their data in political processes, with a focus on political communication, journalism, public opinion, and gender. McGregor’s published work examines how three groups – political actors, the press, and the public – use social media in regards to politics, how that social media use impacts their behavior, and how the policies and actions of social media companies in turn impacts political communication on their platforms. Her work takes up diverse methodologies like surveys, experiments, and large-scale computational and network analysis, as well as qualitative methods like in-depth interviews, to understand politics in socially networked digital spaces. McGregor’s work has been published in top journals like the Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Political Communication, Journalism, and Information, Communication & Society, and she is the co-editor a book (with Dr. Talia Stroud), Digital Discussions: How Big Data Informs Political Communication.

Francesca Tripodi

@ftripodi  HOMEPAGE

Francesca Tripodi is a sociologist and media scholar whose research examines the relationship between social media, political partisanship, and democratic participation, revealing how Google and Wikipedia are manipulated for political gains. She is an Assistant Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and an affiliate at the Data & Society Research Institute. She holds a PhD and MA in sociology from the University of Virginia, as well as an MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University. In 2019, Tripodi testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on her research, explaining how search processes are gamed to maximize exposure and drive ideologically based queries. This research is the basis of her book, which is under contract with Yale University Press. She also studies patterns of gender inequality on Wikipedia, shedding light on how knowledge is contested in the 21^st century. Her research has been covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Columbia Journalism Review, Wired, The Guardian and The Neiman Journalism Lab.

Postdoctoral Research Fellows

Rachel Kuo

@rachelkuo  HOMEPAGE

Rachel Kuo researches and writes on race, social movements, and digital technology. Her research engages contemporary debates about activism and corporate and state governance of data-driven technologies through racial and colonial histories. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CITAP and holds a PhD in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University. Her current manuscript interrogates the concept of ‘solidarity’ across media objects and platforms and demonstrates how technologies enhance and foreclose possibilities for political organization across uneven racial and class differences. She is a founding member and current affiliate of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and also a co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective. Her writing has been published in New Media and Society, Journal of Communication, Routledge Companion to Asian American Media, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, Open Democracy, and Everyday Feminism.

Meredith Pruden

@MeredithPruden  HOMEPAGE

Meredith L. Pruden conducts interdisciplinary and mixed-method research rooted in feminist media studies with specific attention to digital cultures. She uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative computational techniques to explore white and male supremacy, violent misogyny and far-right politics, including the mis/disinformation and conspiracy thinking associated with these groups. Meredith is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CITAP and holds a PhD in Communication (Media Studies) and a certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies both from Georgia State University, where she was also a Presidential Fellow with the university’s Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative. She is also a Fellow with The Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and an affiliate with The Digital Communication Research Lab at University of Buffalo. Her writing has been published in Communication, Culture & Critique, VISTA Journal of Visual Culture, The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society, and the edited volume Misogyny and Media in the Age of Trump.

Administration & Staff

Kathryn Peters

CITAP Executive Director

@katyetc HOMEPAGE

Katy Peters is a civic technologist and nonprofit entrepreneur, who co-founded Democracy Works, a nonpartisan, nonprofit that works to make voting a simple, seamless experience for all Americans. She has been recognized as one of Forbes magazine’s “30 Under 30” in the field of law and policy and as a Champion of Democracy by the National Priorities Project.

Peters’ belief in better democracy has taken her from campaign organizing in Southeast Missouri to a master’s in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government to political rights monitoring in Afghanistan. Her previous experiences include positions with the National Democratic Institute and the United Nations Department of Safety and Security.

During her tenure at Democracy Works, she led the development and launch of TurboVote, an election reminder and voter registration tool that now serves more than 7 million voters in partnership with 175 colleges, several national nonprofits, and corporations that include Snap and Google. She also led Democracy Works’ acquisition of the Voting Information Project, a national open data collaboration that publishes official state polling locations and ballot data.

Gary Marchionini

@marchionini HOMEPAGE

Gary Marchionini is the Dean and Cary C. Boshamer Professor at the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS). An expert in human-information interaction, interface design and testing, and digital libraries, he has published over 200 articles, chapters and, reports in a variety of books and journals. He has received grants or research awards from the National Science Foundation, Council on Library Resources, National Library of Medicine, Library of Congress, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Kellogg Foundation, NASA, The National Cancer Institute, Microsoft, Google, and IBM among others. His professional contributions have been recognized by the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA) Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology (2000) and the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) Award of Merit (2011), the association’s highest honor. His current interests and projects are related to interfaces that support information seeking and information retrieval, and issues arising from data science and ubiquitous information.

Joanna Burke

Joanna Burke is a program administrator with a background in the cultural sector. A classical vocalist by training, she holds master’s degrees from the Jacobs School of Music and the O’Neill School of Public Affairs at Indiana University.  Her top areas of professional interest are public arts, humanities, and interdisciplinary learning, and she has held positions across a variety of organizations and functional areas, including museum education, festival management, and fundraising. Most recently she worked at UNC’s University Development Office as an analyst specializing in relationship management.

Andrew Crist

Andrew Crist is a research application developer, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He co-founded Piedmont Data Points, a consultation firm that worked to transition Nasdaq’s Center for Board Excellence into the cloud computing space and continues to conduct analyses, offer software support, and create new products for Nasdaq. Piedmont Data Points also works with The Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Kansas to create natural language processing tools and online applications. Crist’s primary research interests include the impact of social media and financial technology on society. He has held positions as a data scientist at XPO Logistics, as a researcher at the University of Kansas, and now supports the work of researchers at CITAP.

Faculty & Postdoctoral Affiliates

Graduate Student Affiliates