Seminar series in Computational Social Science – Session 5: Studying Socioeconomic Inequality from Digital Networks

Seminar series in Computational Social Science – at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin  Session 5: ‚Studying Socioeconomic Inequality from Digital Footprint Networks.‘. Milena Tsvetkova London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) Social connectivity structures and reinforces inequality in society but also provides a footprint of it. I will present two projects in which we analyze network structures to extract information about socioeconomic inequality. In the first project, we use correspondence analysis to infer Twitter users’ socioeconomic status from the accounts of commercial and entertainment brands in the US they follow. In the second project, we analyze SafeGraph data on physical store visits and co-visits in the US to investigate nuances of socioeconomic inequality in daily consumption. The projects demonstrate how we can both exploit and examine traces of economic and cultural consumption practices to understand an important manifestation of inequality in everyday life. About the speaker Milena Tsvetkova is Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Methodology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She completed her PhD in Sociology at Cornell University and postdoctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute. In her research, she uses web-based experiments, network analysis, and machine learning on online data to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality. Location Centre Marc Bloch, Friedrichstr 191 Berlin, (U Stadtmitte), Georg-Simmel Room, 3rd floor.