Event Date
Text, Culture, Time: Computational Explorations of Collective Information
Zackary Dunivin
Abstract: This talk presents findings from “Black Lives Matter protests shift public discourse” (PNAS 2022), which shows how BLM leveraged street protests to change the ways we talk about race and politics. Zackary will also report results from “Scalable qualitative coding with LLMs: Chain-of-thought reasoning matches human performance for some hermeneutic tasks” (arXiv 2024), which suggests that GPT-4 and subsequent generative models are capable of sophisticated literary analysis of paragraph-long passages. State-of-the-art tools are far more powerful and accessible than preceding ML models, and allow for much larger samples than human-coding while also freeing up researchers to focus on more creative research aspects.
Zoom Link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/s/97448077707
Bio: Zackary Dunivin is a candidate in Complex Systems and Sociology at Indiana University. Their work draws on various computational tools to study culture and cultural change from the perspectives of dyadic interactions, group dynamics, social movements and formal organizations.
This series
The Department of Communication Brown Bag Series is a regular meeting for developments in Communication and related disciplines, hosted by the UC Davis Department of Communication. It is held at noon on most Thursdays during the academic year.