Kris Shaffer

Data scientist. Web intelligence analyst. Digital media specialist. Author.

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data versus democracy

Election aftermath: what disinformation may look like on November 4

Want an indication of what Russia may do in the US on November 4? Look no further than Bolivia's presidential election.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
5 min read
musicology

An artificially intelligent Christmas hymn

Do robots celebrate Christmas? No. But that doesn't mean that we can't make an algorithm spit out some Christmas carols!

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
6 min read
data science

A cluster analysis of pop/rock harmony

"A cluster analysis of harmony in the McGill Billboard dataset", was accepted for publication in Empirical Musicology Review!

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
2 min read
data versus democracy

It’s finally here!

My complimentary copies of _Data versus Democracy_ arrived today! I'm so happy this has finally come together and is out in the world.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
1 min read
data versus democracy

Data versus Democracy — a.k.a., My book is out!

My new book is out! Data versus Democracy: How Big Data Algorithms Shape Opinions and Alter the Course of History.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
4 min read
digital minimalism

Cryptoparty Resources

It’s Cryptoparty time! To support our efforts, here are some guides to getting folks started with a variety of tools for secure browsing, texting, email, and website hosting.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
8 min read
propagandalytics

Truth in an age of truthiness: when bot-fueled PsyOps meet internet spam

But when artificial amplification becomes itself artificially amplified through the presence of spammers and opportunists, the cost to power for those who game the system in just the right way can be incredibly small.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
12 min read
propagandalytics

Psychographic profiling and Cambridge Analytica

There's been a lot of talk lately about psychological or psychographic profiling based on social-media data. How does it work? (And does it work?!)

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
4 min read
data science

Build an instant Twitter dashboard, with just a little code

Mining tweets? Just provide your search terms, enter a couple commands at the terminal, and voilà, ... instant dashboard!

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
8 min read
data science

When my identity is your slur — what deep learning can tell us about online political discourse

It's no secret our political discourse on social media is less than civil. Deep learning helps us see just how bad it is.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
8 min read
academia

The other side of the tenure tracks

Music theorists have important, in-demand skills to offer outside of faculty jobs. Bringing those skills to those jobs is a success, not a failure.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
7 min read
coding

Introducing the Bootstrap Starter Kit

Bootstrap makes hand-coded websites not look so hand-coded. Here's all you need to get started.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
3 min read
propagandalytics

10 ways to get started fighting internet propaganda

Internet propaganda is such a big problem that it can't go un-addressed. But it can be overwhelming to know how to resist it.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
13 min read
data science

Navigating the WordPress Multisite database labyrinth

Surely there's a table in the database that lists the administrators for each blog... Or so I thought.

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
6 min read
coding

Converting a Jekyll blog to Ghost

Some of my colleagues and I have been playing around with Ghost lately. It's a nice blogging platform -- much leaner than WordPress. And though it's more limited in what it can do

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
4 min read
propagandalytics

Twitter propaganda during 'Unite the Right'

As more and more people take to Twitter to keep up on fast-developing events, it's more important than ever important to understand how their platform facilitates the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and hate,

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
9 min read
propagandalytics

#MacronLeaks - how disinformation spreads

A lot happened online on May 5, 2017. Ben Starling, CE Carey, and I found evidence of a massive disinformation campaign taking place on Twitter and 4chan, in an attempt to swing the

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
3 min read
propagandalytics

Trump, Russia, bots, and Breitbart: tl;dr edition

I've been researching and publishing a lot lately on misinformation, disinformation, ad-tech, sockpuppets, bots, media literacy, election hacking, and the Trump administration. There's a lot there. And it's scary stuff. But in the

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
3 min read
propagandalytics

Visualizing the network that connects mainstream and extremist news

Online advertising plays a crucial role in the spread of misinformation. As Bill Fitzgerald wrote last week, Right now, the status quo in adtech is to sell to all sides, and profit from

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
6 min read
propagandalytics

Fake news, adtech, and the spread of misinformation

The more we study extremist communities online, the more convinced we are that standard advertising practices play a significant role in the spread of misinformation. Further, while many are rightly encouraging us to

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
9 min read
propagandalytics

Mining Twitter data with R, TidyText, and TAGS

One of the best places to get your feet wet with text mining is Twitter data. Though not as open as it used to be for developers, the Twitter API makes it incredibly

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
12 min read
data science

Data mining the New York Philharmonic performance history

The New York Philharmonic has a public dataset containing metadata for their entire performance history. I recently discovered this, and of course downloaded it and started to geek out over it. (On what

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
9 min read
digital minimalism

Digital minimalism ― being deliberate about digital identity

Minimalist lifestyle seems to be the latest craze. Minimalism is not just a genre of music or a visual aesthetic, or even an interior design scheme anymore. People are finding ways to cut

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
3 min read
digital minimalism

I deleted 40,000 tweets last week. Here's why (and how).

This post is Part 2 in my series on digital minimalism. Check out my first post in this series, Digital minimalism ― being deliberate about digital identity. I tweet a lot. Since joining six

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
9 min read
data science

Did third-party votes lose Clinton the election?

Official results are not yet in from every state, but we have good enough numbers to start to tackle some of the statistical questions surrounding last month's presidential election. Wikipedia has curated the

  • Kris Shaffer
    Kris Shaffer
4 min read
Kris Shaffer © 2021
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