Scott Golder
Graduate Student
Sociology Department

Research focus:
Social media services are a promising new resource for social scientists because they generate large amounts of finely-detailed behavioral and relational data, giving us a never-before-seen look into micro-level processes and individual actions for millions of people simultaneously. However, the archives social media services generate are far too large for individual researchers' workstations to process, and cluster computing can help. For a recent project, we used Hadoop to analyze nearly half a billion "tweets" (messages) from Twitter and examine the emotional expressions of millions of users. We believe cloud computing is helping to usher in the era of "computational social science."