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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?!)
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!
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.
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.
coding Introducing the Bootstrap Starter Kit Bootstrap makes hand-coded websites not look so hand-coded. Here's all you need to get started.
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.
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.
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
education From blended learning to hybrid pedagogy The following is a talk I shared at Moravian College to humanities faculty as they work through issues of blended learning in a liberal arts context. The original title of the talk was