PhD student
Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
I'm a PhD student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My advisor is Pamela Oliver. Substantively, I’m interested in social movements, social media, and the Middle East. Methodologically, I’m interested in social networks and textual analysis. My master's thesis looks into the genesis of the the 6th of April Youth Movement with computer-aided content analysis methods. My dissertation focuses on the relationship between grievances, media discourses on grievances, and collective action in Egypt.
I am also currently the student co-leader of the Social Media and Democracy group, advised by Dhavan Shah, Young Mie Kim, and Chris Wells. Right now we're working on a project surrounding political communication on Twitter during the 2012 elections.
I contribute regularly to the computational social science blog Bad Hessian, where I write about Python, R, Twitter, and RuPaul's Drag Race. I try to release most of my code as open source software.
In my spare time, I read and hack software (even more). Suffice to say, I'm addicted to coffee. If a mathematician is a machine that turns coffee into theorems (Erdős by way of Rényi), I'm still trying to figure out what social scientists turn coffee into.