Interactions and activities of people recorded as digital traces via digital devices or online environments offer increasingly comprehensive pictures of both, individual and group-level behavior. These traces may even allow to describe and explain human biases like perception biases, gender bias or sexist attitudes. However, several methodological challenges arise when working with non-reactive digital trace data. In this talk, Professor Wagner will focus on some of the issues that become apparent when we aim to measure and explain social constructs like sexist attitudes based on the digital traces that humans leave online. She will present some work on assessing the measurement bias of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods for detecting sexism. Secondly, Professor Wagner will show how homophily and groups size differences impact the visibility of minorities in rankings and to what extent perception biases of humans can be explained by the structure of the social network in which they are embedded.Interactions and activities of people recorded as digital traces via digital devices or online environments offer increasingly comprehensive pictures of both, individual and group-level behavior. These traces may even allow to describe and explain human biases like perception biases, gender bias or sexist attitudes. However, several methodological challenges arise when working with non-reactive digital trace data. In this talk, Professor Wagner will focus on some of the issues that become apparent when we aim to measure and explain social constructs like sexist attitudes based on the digital traces that humans leave online. She will present some work on assessing the measurement bias of Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods for detecting sexism. Secondly, Professor Wagner will show how homophily and groups size differences impact the visibility of minorities in rankings and to what extent perception biases of humans can be explained by the structure of the social network in which they are embedded.

Claudia Wagner is Professor for Applied Computational Social Science at RWTH Aachen University and Head of Computational Social Science Department at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Her main research interests include the methodological challenges that arise when using digital trace data and the impact of the digitalization on society.

We welcome Claudia Wagner as a guest of our workshop Women in Computational Social Sciences which takes place in Lucerne from November 12th to 14th. The workshop aims at fostering collaboration between female computer scientists and social scientists, making use of each other’s value domain knowledge, developing a form of multilingualism among scholars.

The meeting will be online:
https://unilu.zoom.us/j/99231510091?pwd=RG5nbFFaanZmQlorRUdKVHh6YUJxUT09
Meeting-ID: 992 3151 0091
Kenncode: 270533

Flyer