During the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, news organizations occupied an unexpected position in digital information networks. Our team's analysis of 141 million tweets from 24 million users revealed that journalism functioned as connective infrastructure on Twitter, bridging otherwise disconnected communities across ideological, geographic, and linguistic divides. News accounts created the structural links that held fragmented publics together during a period of profound uncertainty.
James Lee
Associate University Librarian for Academic Innovation and Associate Professor
James Lee, PhD is an information science scholar who works at the intersection of data science, digital humanities, and network analysis. His overarching interest lies in how the humanities can add nuance to the methods of machine learning and network science.
Projects
Projects James Lee has worked on.
Environmental Archives for EveryoneBuilding a Public Access Platform
Northwestern University has been awarded a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to transform the world's largest archive of U.S. Environmental Impact Statements into a globally accessible digital resource. This collection contains 48,280 federal documents (3.5 million pages) capturing five decades of debates between government agencies, corporations, and affected communities about major environmental projects, from highway construction to nuclear facilities. These documents hold crucial evidence about how environmental decisions have been justified, who benefited, who bore the costs, and which voices were heard or silenced.