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The Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) is an interdisciplinary research group made up of faculty and students at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the Carleton College Computer Science Department, the School of Information at UT Austin and the Purdue University School of Communication.
We are social scientists applying a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of online communities. We seek to understand both how and why some attempts at collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities and high quality work products.
Our research is particularly focused on how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like an individual’s decision to join a community, contribute to a public good, or a group’s ability to make decisions democratically.
Our research is deeply interdisciplinary, most frequently consists of “big data” quantitative analyses, and lies at the intersection of communication, sociology, and human-computer interaction.
To learn more about the CDSC, please check out our about page (especially the links there). Prospective students should also review these materials.
Courses
In addition to research, we teach classes and run workshops. Some of that work is coordinated on this wiki. A more detailed lists of workshops and teaching material on this wiki is on our Workshops and Classes page. In this page, we only list ongoing classes and workshops with pages or syllabuses wiki pages.
University of Washington | Bothell Courses
- [Winter 2026] CSS350: Management Principles -- Surveys social scientific perspectives on being part of an organization. Taught by Kaylea Champion.
- [Winter 2026] CSS360: Software Engineering — Surveys the software engineering processes, tools, and techniques used in software development and quality assurance. Taught by Kaylea Champion.
University of Washington | Seattle Courses
- [Fall 2025] COM 500: Communication Theory Development — This is a required introductory course for new students in the MA/PhD program at UW. It provides a sort of introduction to field/discipline of communication, communication theory, and the department in particular.
- [Fall 2025] COMMLD 570A: Building Successful Online Communities — A course on online communities taught by Benjamin Mako Hill in the Communication Leadership Masters Program (COMMLD).
Public Data Science Workshops
Community Data Science Workshops — The Community Data Science Workshops (CDSW) are a series of workshops designed to introduce some of the basic tools of programming and analysis of data from online communities to absolute beginners. The CDSW have been held six times in Seattle between 2014 and 2020. So far, more than 100 people have volunteered their weekends to teach more than 500 people to program in Python, to build datasets from Web APIs, and to ask and answer questions using these data.
Research Resources
If you are a member of the collective, perhaps you're looking for CommunityData:Resources which includes details on email, TeX templates, documentation on our computing resources, etc.
About This Wiki
This is open to the public and hackable by all but mostly contains information that will be useful to collective members, their collaborators, people enrolled in their projects, or people interested in building off of their work. If you're interested in making a change or creating content here, generally feel empowered to Be Bold. If things don't fit, somebody who watches this wiki will be in touch.
This is mostly a normal MediaWiki although there are a few things to know:
- There's a CAPTCHA enabled. If you create an account and then contact any collective member with the username (on or off wiki), they can turn the CAPTCHA off for you.
- Extension:Math is installed so you can write math here. Basically you just add math by putting TeX inside <math> tags like this: <math>\frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}}</math> and it will write $ {\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {n}}} $.
Research News
Follow us on Bluesky as @communitydata.science, https://social.coop/@communitydata @communitydata@social.coop in the Fediverse/Mastodon], or @comdatasci on X/Twitter.
Best of all, subscribe to [to the Community Data Science Collective blog which sign up to get email updates from! Recent posts from the blog include:
- AI Didn’t Start the Fire: How Stack Exchange Moderators and Users Demonstrate Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
- Generative AI technologies rely on content from knowledge communities as their training data. However, these communities receive little in return and instead experience increasing moderation burdens imposed by an influx of AI-generated content. Moreover, as platform operators sell their content to AI developers whose products may substitute for their work, these communities see a decrease …
- — yiweiwu 2026-02-24
- Why do people participate in similar online communities?
- Note: We have missed publishing blog posts about academic papers over the past few years. To ensure that my blog contains a more comprehensive record of our published papers and to surface these for folks who missed them, I will be periodically publishing blog posts about some “older” published projects. It seems natural to think …
Continue reading "Why do people participate in similar online communities?"
- — Benjamin Mako Hill http://mako.cc 2026-02-16
- CDSC at the NCA 2025
- CDSC members will be presenting at this years National Communication Association (NCA) Convention in Denver! You are warmly invited to join CDSC members during our talks and other scheduled events. Please come say hi! Check out group members attending and what research they’ll be sharing: Dyuti Jha: Dyuti will be presenting her paper titled “Mapping …
- — madisondeyo 2026-01-05
- Welcome new student members of the CDSC!
- Most years, the CDSC is lucky enough to recruit some amazing new Ph.D. students to the lab. This fall is no exception and we are thrilled to welcome an extraordinary group across several of our group’s campuses. The students join us from a wide variety of places, backgrounds, and prior affiliations (which should be encouraging …
- — Aaron Shaw http://aaronshaw.org 2026-01-05
- Science of Community Dialogue: The Impacts of Organizational Interventions in Open Source Software Engineering
- This dialogue will take place on November 7th at 12pm CT and will explore how free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects adapt their work processes to recruit new contributors and build the project communities that they want, and how FLOSS projects redesign collaboration processes within different environments and moments in project lifecycles. Professor Igor Steinmacher (Northern Arizona …
- — madisondeyo 2026-01-05
