I am a research director – social scientist, data scientist,
community-engaged scholar, and administrator – and faculty member with
20+ years of experience teaching, leading, and managing research and
data science teams.
I work as the Director of Equitable Analysis in The Equity Center at the
University of Virginia working with an amazing collection of scholars
and practitioners, community experts, and students to create analysis
and tools in support of a more just and equitable region. I also teach
in the Batten School of
Leadership in Public Policy, focusing on data ethics, public
interest technology, and equitable policy, and am an affiliated faculty
with the School of Data
Science.
I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a
political science professor and quantitative scholar at the University
of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged
in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for
Public Service; as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab; as
a library director building Research Data Services and the
Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences; and as a researcher
bridging applied and academic interests with community partners and
advocates.
And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners
along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work,
including:
- The RVA Eviction
Lab at VCU, building data tools to support activists and advocates
fighting harmful evictions.
- The Environmental
Institute at UVA, working with an interdisciplinary team to
translate science into data-rich decision support tools for the Eastern
Shore of Virginia.
- Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a
community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in
the Batten School of Public Policy,
- The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian
Collaborative at UVA, working on predictive analytics for
humanitarian goals,
My own work centers on action-based research, using the tools of data
science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other
social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building. More
importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the incredible young people I get to
work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.
Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the
banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown
bluegrass band!
Teaching and Instruction
Current courses and past workshops, instructional blog posts, and
other projects and materials created as educational resources.
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This course provide data science experience to students in service of
equity and justice. We practice working collaboratively, openly,
inclusively, and reproducibly, interrogating our work in an ongoing
project to learn how we might use data science for liberation.
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Spring 2023 class
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Spring 2022
class
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Over the course of the semester, we unpack the meaning of equity in
policy, review methods of assessig for equity, and examine concrete
policy decisions and domains through an equity lens. Through team-based
projects focusing on policies targeted at the challenges faced by
different populations and people, we generate concrete examples of what
such a process could look like.
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Fall 2022
class
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Fall 2021 class
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This short course is a 5-week introduction to the principles and tools
of data visualization – we explore multiple approaches to understand,
present and communicate about data – with some side trips into data
wrangling and processing.
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Fall 2022 class
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Fall 2021 class
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A multi-part example of text analysis in R
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Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape
website.
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Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
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Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment
analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching
methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models,
and multi-part data science series
Research Projects
More academically-oriented work
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An empirical examination of the relationship between the historical
occurrence of racial violence and Confederate memorializaitons.
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Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Co-authored with Kyshia Henderson, Samuel Powers, Jazmin L.
Brown-Iannuzzi, and Sophie Trawalter
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Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use
in humanitarian response.
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Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global
Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International.
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An ongoing research effort to record decades of thoughtful and bold
calls for racial equity written by students, faculty, and staff at the
University of Virginia, to analyze them for common themes, and to create
an interactive library to advance the conversation.
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A collaboration between the UVA Equity Center and the President’s Racial
Equity Task Force.
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Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income
students thrive
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Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and
knowledge for advocacy and change.
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Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that
allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government
from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of
information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the
barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in
time, education, and access.
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In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic
capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html
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My book (University of Illinois Press 2011) examines how citizens learn
and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
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- Hearing Campaign Appeals: The Accountability Implications of
Campaign Tone. Political Communication 29: 64-85.
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- Making a Connection: Repetition and Priming in Campaigns. Journal of
Politics 70: 1142-1159.
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Investigating the causes and consequences of citizen participation in
electoral systems.
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- Citizen Participation and Congressional Responsiveness: New Evidence
for Why Participation Matters. Legislative Studies Quarterly 38: 59-82.
With Paul Martin.
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- Creating Constituencies: Presidential Campaigns, the Scope of
Conflict, and Selective Mobilization. Political Behavior 34: 27-56. With
Paul Martin.
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- Gender Differences in Citizen-Level Democratic Citizenship: Evidence
from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. IPSA 2000, MPSA 2001,
CSES 2002. With Virginia Sapiro.
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Examining the production of social capital and how social capital
promotes policy accountability.
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- The Third Face of Social Capital: How membership in Voluntary
Associations Improves Policy Accountability. Political Research
Quarterly 60: 192-201. With Paul Martin.
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- Trusting and Joining: An Empirical Test of the Reciprocal Nature of
Social Capital. Political Behavior 22: 267-291. With Paul Martin.
Library Projects
Projects done on behalf of library units and initiatives.
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A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data
Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.
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To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal
packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles
downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of
articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal
by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via
open-access.
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Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.
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A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in
library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to
library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of
visitors.
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And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about
re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.
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Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a
responsibility-centered budget model.