Dr. Shugars’ research in computational communication and political communication examines how the platforms, data, and methods of our modern computational world have fundamentally reshaped the ways in which citizens engage with their societies as well as the ways in which researchers can study this political behavior. Their work extends along three interconnected themes: digital discourse, information ecosystems, and critical computational social science.
Individuals increasingly acquire political information from social media, frequently through interpersonal, peer-to-peer conversation. Furthermore, these platforms have fundamentally shifted the speed, modality, and nature of “everyday“ political talk, creating a deep need for both theory-building and computational examination of these platforms and their role in political life. This strand of research therefore aims to better understand how digital tools are used in modern discourse and to build new theory around the unique affordances of these platforms.
Select Publications and Working Papers
Social Media & Society. Forthcoming.
Casey Randazzo, Sarah Shugars, Rachel Acosta, and Marya Doerfel.
Frontiers: Network Analysis of Social Media Texts. 9(1). 1-25. 2024.
How expertise mediates the effects of numerical and textual communication on individual and collective accuracy
Nick Beauchamp, Sarah Shugars, Briony Swire-Thompson, and David Lazer. Decision
Rishav Hada, Amir Ebrahimi Fard, Sarah Shugars, Federico Bianchi, Patricia Rossini, Dirk Hovy, Rebekah Tromble, Nava Tintarev.
Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM). 2023.
Sarah Shugars
Communication Methods and Measures, June 2020.
Sarah Shugars and Nick Beauchamp
SAGE Open: Social Media and Political Participation Global Issue, March 2019
Xingshan Zeng, Jing Li, Lu Wang, Nick Beauchamp, Sarah Shugars, and Kam-Fai Wong
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), June 2018
Lu Wang, Nicholas Beauchamp, Sarah Shugars, and Kechen Qin.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), Volume 5, 219-232. 2017.
Joshua A. Miller, Sarah Shugars, and Daniel Levine
The Good Society, June 2018.
Sarah Shugars, working paper.
Recipient of the 2020 John Sprague Award: Best Paper in Political Networks
Online conversations are not isolated incidents but take place within vast ecosystems of information sharing and curation. Expanding across platforms and websites, these digital ecosystems are shaped through processes of asymmetric information sharing as users receive curated streams of information while also curating information for their followers. This line of work aims to make sense of these complex ecosystems with a particular focus on better understanding the digital experiences of marginalized and under-studied populations.
Select Publications and Working Papers
Curation bubbles
Jon Green, Stephan McCabe, Sarah Shugars, Hanyu Chwe, Luke Horgan, Shuyang Cao, and David Lazer.
American Political Science Review. 1(19). 2025.
The speech we miss: How keyword-based data collection obscures youth participation in online political discourse
Adina Gitomer, Sarah Shugars, Ryan J. Gallagher, Stefan McCabe, Brooke Foucault Welles.
Computational Communication Research, 5(1). 2023.
Pandemics, protests, and publics: Demographic activity and engagement on Twitter in 2020
Sarah Shugars, Adina Gitomer, Stefan McCabe, Ryan J. Gallagher, Kenneth Joseph, Nir Grinberg, Larissa Doroshenko, Brooke Foucault Welles, and David Lazer. Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 1. 2021.
Sustained amplification of COVID-19 elites in the United States
Ryan J. Gallagher, Larissa Doroshenko, Sarah Shugars, David Lazer, and Brooke Foucault Welles.
Social Media + Society, 2021.
While computational methods have tremendous potential for behavioral insight, the semi-automated analysis of passively collected human subject data also raises many important ethical and conceptual questions. Dr. Shugars advocates for computational approaches that are theoretically grounded and mindful of the limitations of algorithmic analyses. They label this work “critical computational social science,” because it draws on critical theory to interrogate the use of computational methods in answering social science questions.
Select Publications and Working Papers
Categorizing the non-categorical: The challenges of studying gendered phenomena online
Sarah Shugars, Alexi Quintana-Mathé, Robin Lange, and David Lazer.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 29(1). 1-12. 2024.
Critical computational social science
Sarah Shugars
European Physical Journal (EPJ) Data Science. 13(13). 1-10. 2024.
A Matter of Perspective: Computational Social Science and Researcher Choice
Sarah Shugars
In J. Box-Steffensmeier, D. Christenson, and V. Sinclair-Chapman (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Methodological Pluralism. Oxford University Press. 2024.
Semantic and cultural networks
Sarah Shugars and Sandra González-Bailón.
The Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis (Second Edition). Edited by John McLevey, Peter J. Carrington, and John Scott. Forthcoming.
(Mis)alignment between stance expressed in social media data and public opinion surveys
Kenneth Joseph, Sarah Shugars, Ryan J. Gallagher, Jon Green, Alexi Quintana Mathé, Zijian An, and David Lazer.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2021.