Description:

Please join the Statistical Computing Workshop as they host Yindgan Liu, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies in the School of Communication at Northwestern University, for a presentation titled, "Rethinking Computational Multimodal Analysis in Social Science Research". 

ABSTRACT: Social science researchers are increasingly leveraging large-scale video data and computational methods to examine key concepts and questions. Yet much existing work relies on a narrow set of video features and focuses mainly on text or static visuals, leaving other high-dimensional features and modalities underexamined. This talk addresses the gap by presenting two empirical research in Computational Media and Politics Lab that use large language models (LLMs) and other computational methods to enable more systematic and comprehensive video understanding. The talk will conclude with a discussion of future opportunities and challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

Bio: Yingdan Liu (Ph.D., Stanford University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. She is the director of the Computational Media and Politics Lab, and the co-director of the Computational Multimodal Communication Lab. Her research focuses on digital technology, political communication, and multimodal communication. She uses computational and qualitative methods to understand the role of digital technologies in authoritarian politics and develops computational frameworks to understand multimodal communication across different contexts in the age of artificial intelligence. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), American Journal of Political Science, Political Communication, New Media & Society, and among other peer-reviewed journals.