11. The Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Voter Turnout and Overcoming Project Setbacks with Aaron Schein

This episode features Aaron Schein, a computer scientist and postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University. We discuss his WWW 2021 paper "Assessing the Effects of Friend-to-Friend Texting on Turnout in the 2018 US Midterm Elections", co-authored with Keyon Vafa, Dhanya Sridhar, Victor Veitch, Jeffery Quinn, James Moffet, David Blei, and Donald Green. Aaron shares with us how he collaborated with industry partners, overcame the discovery of a confounder that challenged the experiment’s original design, and responded to public feedback. He also mapped his interdisciplinary journey through linguistics, political science, and computer science, and shared his twist on imposter syndrome.

Om Podcasten

Large-scale data has become a major component of research about human behavior and society. But how are interdisciplinary collaborations that use large-scale social data formed and maintained? What obstacles are encountered on the journey from idea conception to publication? In this podcast, we investigate these questions by probing the “research diaries” of scholars in computational social science and adjacent fields. We unmask the research process with the hope of normalizing the challenges of and increasing accessibility in academia. Music: Jon Gillick.