Research Assistant Opening: Social Network Communication Analysis

What you'll work on

Help me study how information flows through online communities and social networks. You’ll design lightweight studies, pull and clean conversation data, and turn patterns into insights we can publish or share with partners.

• Collect and maintain datasets from social/network APIs and exports.
• Run text and network analyses to spot diffusion patterns, coordination, and sentiment shifts.
• Design small experiments or interventions, then track the impact on communication dynamics.
• Visualize results and write clear summaries for talks, blog posts, and papers.

Who should apply

• Experience in or strong curiosity about social network/communication analysis.
• Comfort working with messy real-world data and documenting decisions.
• Able to communicate methods and results clearly in writing.

Requirements

• Python experience or a clear plan to become productive quickly.
• Interest in social network communication analysis and willingness to learn new methods.
• Reliable, proactive, and comfortable iterating with feedback.

Nice to have

• Experience with social APIs (Reddit, X/Twitter, Discord, etc.) or graph databases.
• Familiarity with causal inference or A/B testing for communication experiments.
• Qualitative coding or mixed-methods experience to pair with quantitative work.
• Experience with China-specific platforms (Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Weibo, Bilibili) and their data ecosystems.

How to apply

Email me with the subject line “RA — Social Network Analysis.” Include a short intro, a 1–2 paragraph description of a relevant project, links (GitHub, portfolio, or papers), and your availability.