The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded infrastructure project aimed to help researchers study online behavior. Participants install a browser extension and/or mobile apps to donate their online activity data along with comprehensive survey responses. The infrastructure, located at Northeastern University, will offer approved researchers access to a suite of structured, parsed content data for selected domains to enable analyses and understanding of Internet use in the US. This is all conducted within a robust research ethics framework, emphasizing ongoing informed consent, and multiple layers, technical and legal, of interventions to protect the values at stake in data collection, data access, and research.
This talk will provide a brief overview of the contemporary need to build shared infrastructure for studying the internet, discuss the details of the NIO infrastructure, the data collected, the participants, and the researcher intake process.
Bio: David Lazer is a University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, and Co-Director, NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science. Prior to coming to Northeastern University, he was on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School (1998-2009). In 2019, he was elected a fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research has been published in such journals as Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Political Science Review, Organization Science, and the Administrative Science Quarterly, and has received extensive coverage in the media, including the New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and CBS Evening News.
He is among the leading scholars in the world on misinformation and computational social science and has served in multiple leadership and editorial positions, including as a board member for the International Network of Social Network Analysts (INSNA), reviewing editor for Science, associate editor of Social Networks and Network Science, numerous other editorial boards and program committees.
In-person attendance is open to Princeton University faculty, staff and students.
It will be recorded and posted here, on the CITP YouTube channel, and on the Princeton University Media Central channel.
If you need an accommodation for a disability please contact Jean Butcher at butcher@princeton.edu at least one week before the event.
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