10. Political Discourse and Substantive-Methodological Intersections with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling

Diaries of Social Data Research

In this episode, we talk with Justine Zhang and Arthur Spirling. Justine is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and Arthur is a Professor of Politics and Data Science at New York University. We discuss their 2017 EMNLP paper, with Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, "Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse."

Justine and Arthur touch on how collaborations can provide real insight into other disciplines as well as their different paces and writing norms. We also discuss substantive validation for unsupervised learning methods, marinating in "fun" data, the responsibility of studying political institutions that touch all aspects of human life, and a call for administrators to incentivize these kinds of collaborations.