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Publication in The International Journal of Press/Politics
Published:
Last week, the theory chapter from my Ph.D. dissertation was published by The International Journal of Press/Politics. In this paper, I introduce a conceptual framework called “News Reading Publics” which I argue, helps us understand the audience fragmentation of national news reading populations outside western contexts. Read more
Announcing SICSS-Singapore
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I am excited to co-organize the inaugural edition of SICSS-Singapore! SICSS (Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science) is a global initiative to bring together graduate students, postdocs and early career faculty members for intensive study and interdisciplinary research in computational social science for a two week period, and SICSS-Singapore will be the first SICSS partner location in the ASEAN region. Read more
A year (and a bit more) in books
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2021 was a tough year, generally speaking. So I have a lot to be grateful about to my public library memberships that gave me access to a wealth of books in electronic and audio formats over the past thirteen odd months. Here is a list of the (strictly non-academic) books that I read (including three that I re-read), in no-particular order, that eased me into pockets of positivity when the rest of the world felt like Dante’s ninth circle of hell. In parenthesis, is my one word recommendation (skip or read) for each. Read more
Publication in Social Networks
Published:
Last month, I (along with my co-authors, Tian Yang, Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon, and Georg Stadler) had a paper accepted at Social Networks - which was in the works since 2018! Read more
Publication in Scientific Reports
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Excited to have my first solo authored peer-reviewed journal article published today in Scientific Reports! This is a methodological paper that formalizes as well as extends some of the more technical network science approaches that I used for my dissertation research, and lays down recommendations for those seeking to analyse audience co-exposure networks. Read more
A Note about Epistemologies
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One of the most interesting ways in which the fundamental difference between Western and Indian epistemologies manifests itself lies in the word philosophy and its Sanskrit equivalent दर्शन (darshan). The English word philosophy is derived from the Greek philosophia, which translates to “love of wisdom”. Philosophy, correspondingly, is defined according to the Oxford Dictionary as “the study of the nature and meaning of the universe and of human life”. Note that the definition describes the end goal, while remaining silent on how it is to be achieved. The Sanskrit word darshan on the other hand, derived from the root drish (“to see”), literally translates to “vision”. This is because the ancient Indian way of knowing fundamental truths about the world, prioritized one methodology over all others – that of “seeing”, or at the very least, feeling, experiencing, or “intuiting” the truth. Read more
Gene-culture evolution and the Secret of our Success
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I recently read a fascinating book on the story of human evolution called ‘‘The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter’’ written by Joseph Henrich, professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard University. Notwithstanding the tedious title, it altered how I fundamentally think about human beings as a biological species. In this post, I would like to record a couple of things that particularly caught my attention, and made me update my priors. Read more
Time, a mathematical illusion?
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The following is a piece I wrote for an Arts Festival held at my university. You can read the original here. Read more
Two Limericks
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One
Read moreChicago: An Incomplete Ode
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One block away from our apartment on W Polk Street in Chicago was Jarabe, arguably the - indulge me for a moment - greatest Mexican street food place in the world. When they first opened shop back in 2016, my taste in Mexican food was limited to the few places in and around University City in West Philadelphia. Ugly Delicious hadn’t begun streaming on Netflix, so South Philly Barbacoa was still unknown to me. Read more
Byline in the Washington Post!
Published:
I wrote an article for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog with my collaborators, Profs. Kokil Jaida and Yphtach Lelkes. In this piece, we discussed some of our findings on the political biases on American Twitter, in light of recent spats between Trump and the social media company. Read more
Publication in Political Communication
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Back in the Spring of 2018, when my friend Tian Yang and I pitched a proposal for the final paper for a research methods class, little did we expect anything to happen out of it. We really had no reason to. Back then, both Tian and I did purely observational research - which is really just a fancy word for analyzing data. However, we shared a mutual interest in running behavioral experiments. So what began on a cursory whim more than two years ago, finally saw the light of day last month when it was published in the Political Communication journal. Read more
A (somewhat) pensive note about my PhD journey
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Back in 2015, when Nilanjana and I embarked on our respective graduate school journeys, little did we anticipate things to turn out the way they did: halfway through this journey, we were married; six months later, I had left Philadelphia and moved to Chicago; another two years down, with an unprecedented pandemic raging around the world and with the US living through an extraordinary political moment, we had defended our PhD dissertations within a week of each other. Read more
PhD Acknowledgments
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I defended my PhD dissertation today! Because a PhD is so much more than an individual effort, this is what I wrote in the acknowledgements section of my dissertation: Read more
Goodbye Blogger
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This is my first blog post on GitHub Pages! Read more