About

Nancy Gray, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray

Solon Barocas, André Brock, Kishonna Gray, Dan Greene, Sarah Hamid, and Dylan Mulvin 

The Social Media Collective (SMC) is a network of social science and humanistic researchers, part of the Microsoft Research labs in New England and New York. It includes full-time researchers, postdocs, interns, and visitors. Beginning in 2009, the researchers who now lead the initiative are: Nancy Baym, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray.

Our primary purpose is to provide rich contextual understanding into the social and cultural dynamics that underpin social media technologies. Our work spans several disciplines: anthropology, communication, economics, information, law, media studies, women’s studies, science & technology studies, and sociology. Examples of our current and past research include:

•      What are the social and cultural issues arising from data-centric tech development?
•      How does the use of social media affect relationships between artists and audiences in creative industries and what does that tell us about the future of work?
•      What are the politics, ethics, and policy implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning? How do machine learning techniques interpret and represent the social world?
•      What are the cultural, political, and economic implications of crowdsourcing as a new form of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital labor?
•      What kind of public obligations are social media platforms now facing, and how is this shifting how they approach policing user content and behavior?
•      What kinds of biases can be embedded in algorithms, how should public concerns shape algorithmic design?
•      How do youth make sense of social media? What are their working notions of privacy?
•      How do people with minimal internet access use mobile media to negotiate marginalization and increase social mobility?
•      How does technology alter the landscape of human trafficking?

You can find an updated list of our scholarly work here. We are regular contributors to the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), The International Communication Association (ICA), The American Anthropological Association (AAA), the American Sociological Association (ASA), and The Society for the Social Study of Science (4S). We are also deeply involved with the Data & Society Research Institute, founded by danah boyd in 2014.

We also aim to play a role in shaping public conversations about the intersection of technology and society through public speaking and commentary. We’ve written numerous op-eds in venues like the New York Times and the Atlantic. We have also given public lectures at a variety of venues including World Economic Forum, O’Reilly’s Strata Conference, the Federal Trade Commission, and European music industry conventions. Our efforts are intended to help people get past mistaken assumptions and persistent fears, to better understand the role of technology in society.

We typically support two two-year postdoctoral researchers, and three advanced PhD students as summer interns. Follow our blog, Socialmediacollective.org, for announcements of these and other opportunities, as well as scholarship from the permanent researchers and our broader ‘collective’ of visitors and colleagues.

Current Members

• Solon Barocas – Postdoctoral Researcher
• Nancy Baym – Principal Researcher
• danah boyd – Principal Researcher
• André Brock – Faculty Visitor (University of Michigan)
• Kate Crawford – Principal Researcher
• Tarleton Gillespie – Principal Researcher
• Kishonna Gray – Faculty Visitor (Eastern Kentucky University / MIT)
• Mary L. Gray – Senior Researcher
• Dan Greene – Postdoctoral Researcher
• Sarah Hamid – Research Assistant
• Dylan Mulvin – Postdoctoral Researcher

Past Postdoctoral Researchers

• Mike Ananny, USC
• Sarah Brayne, University of Texas, Austin
• Kevin Driscoll, University of Virginia
• Megan Finn, University of Washington
• Alice Marwick, Data & Society, University of North Carolina
• Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Fuse Labs, Microsoft Research
• Jessa Lingel, University of Pennsylvania
• Lana Swartz, University of Virginia

Past Research Assistants

• Andrea Alarcon, University of Southern California
• Rebecca Hoffman
• Kate Miltner, University of Southern California
• Steven Schirra, MIT
• Alex Leavitt, University of Southern California
• Heather Casteel
• Mitali Thakor, MIT

Past Interns

2016

• Stefanie Duguay (Queensland University of Technology)
• Caroline Jack (Cornell University)
• Shannon McGregor (University of Texas, Austin)
• Aaron Plasek (Columbia University)
• Ming Yin (Harvard University)

2015

• Ifeoma Ajunwa (Columbia University)
• Stacy Blasiola (University of Illinois at Chicago)
• Aleena Chia (Indiana University)
• J. Nathan Matias (MIT)
• Nick Seaver (UC Irvine)

2014

• Tressie McMillan Cottom (Emory University)
• Luke Stark (New York University)
• Katrin Tiidenberg (University of Tallinn)
• Kathryn Zyskowski (University of Washington)

2013

• Jade Davis (University of North Carolina)
• Tero Karppi (University of Turku)
• Jolie Matthews (Stanford University)
• Josh McVeigh-Schultz (University of Southern California)

2012

• Jed Brubaker (UC Irvine)
• Airi Lampinen (Helsinki Institute for Information Technology)
• Jaroslav Švelch (Charles University in Prague)
• Shawn Walker (University of Washington)

2011

• Jazmin Gonzalez-Rivero (HS Intern)
• Germaine Halegoua (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
• Dunia Kassay (HS Intern)
• Jessa Lingel, (Rutgers University)
• Laura Norén (New York University)
• Sonya Vohra (HS Intern)

2010

• Amelia Abreu (University of Washington)
• Jazmin Gonzalez-Rivero (HS Intern)
• Andres Monroy-Hernandez, (MIT)
• Omar Wasow (Harvard University)

2009

• Scott Golder (Cornell University)
• Alice Marwick (New York University)
• Sarita Yardi (Georgia Tech)

Past Faculty Visitors

• Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon
• Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology
• Beth Coleman, MIT
• Judith Donath, Harvard Berkman Center
• Paul Dourish, UC Irvine
• Nicole Ellison, Michigan State University
• Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
• Henry Jenkins, USC
• Sonia Livingstone, LSE
• Annette Markham, Aarhus University
• Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, Finland
• Jonathan Sterne, McGill University
• Tom Streeter, University of Vermont
• TL Taylor, MIT
• Siva Vaidhyanathan, University of Virginia