We’re thrilled that Desmond Patton, associate professor in the School of Social Work at Columbia University, is visiting us for the first half of 2020. He’s a rare bird in our field, able both to explain the importance of cultural contexts in data science techniques to technical experts, and to do the important ethnographic work necessary to take account of those contexts. His research “uses qualitative and computational data collection methods to examine the relationship between youth and gang violence and social media; how and why violence, grief, and identity are expressed on social media; and the real-world impact these expressions have on well-being for low-income youth of color.”

By way of getting to know his work, if you’re in the Boston/Cambridge area, you have an excellent opportunity to hear him speak tomorrow (Thurs Feb 20, 5-6:30pm) as pat of the MIT Comparative Media Studies / Writing colloquium series. Beyond that, we wanted to share two new papers from him and his colleagues that may be of interest. The first describes a collaborative, critical methodology for extracting context in social media posts for natural language processing tasks. The second paper describes a new web-based annotation system (VATAS) designed to help social workers and social scientists conduct social media analysis.

Desmond U. Patton, William R. Frey, Kyle A. McGregor, Fei-Tzin Lee, Kathleen McKeown, Emanuel Moss (2020) “Contextual Analysis of Social Media: The Promise and Challenge of Eliciting Context in Social Media Posts with Natural Language Processing” AIES ’20: Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society. 337-342. 

Desmond U. Patton, Philipp Blandfort, William R. Frey, Rossano Schifanella, Kyle A. McGregor, Shih-GFu Chang (2020) “VATAS: An Open-Source Web Platform for Visual and Textual Analysis of Social Media” Journal of the Society of Social Work and Research.