“Studying Socioeconomic Inequality from Digital Footprint Networks,” Milena Tsvetkova, LSE

COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP

Abstract: 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.

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, agent-based modeling, and network analysis and machine learning on online data to investigate fundamental social phenomena such as cooperation, social contagion, segregation, and inequality. Her work has been sponsored by the US National Science Foundation and Germany’s Volkswagen Foundation, published in high-impact disciplinary and general science journals such as New Media and Society, Nature Scientific Reports, and Science Advances, and covered by The New York Times, The Guardian, and Science, among others.

This workshop is open to the Yale community and will be held in person. To receive regular announcements and attendance information, please subscribe to the seminar series at https://csap.yale.edu/computational-social-science-workshop.

This workshop is cosponsored by the Center for the Study of American Politics (CSAP) and the Yale School of Management (SOM) with support from the Initiative for Leadership and Organization at SOM.