As people engage with online platforms by the millions, they generate massive, unstructured digital traces of their behavior. While these records contain rich, fine-grained, and voluminous information about how people interact, it remains challenging to interpret and draw meaning from the macroscale structure that emerges from them. In this project, we introduce and develop behavioral embeddings, a neural embedding methodology for extracting insight from large-scale, unstructured social data. In behavioral embeddings, entities such as communities, tags, or articles are embedded in a high-dimensional space such that two entities are close in the space if and only if similar users engage with them. We demonstrate that this notion of social similarity provides an extremely useful framework for understanding the macroscale structure of large social datasets.

Links

Blog posts

Imagine All The People: A Social Map of Music on Reddit
What connects the Foo Fighers, James Blunt, and Eminem?

Publications

Quantifying the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Analysis of Patreon
Lana El Sanyoura and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{el2022quantifying,
  title={Quantifying the {C}reator {E}conomy: {A} {L}arge-{S}cale {A}nalysis of {P}atreon},
  author={El Sanyoura, Lana and Anderson, Ashton},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the {I}nternational {AAAI} {C}onference on {W}eb and {S}ocial {M}edia},
  volume={16},
  pages={829--840},
  year={2022}
}
The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify
Lillio Mok, Samuel F. Way, Lucas Maystre, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{mok2023spotifyexplore,
  title={The Dynamics of Exploration on Spotify},
  author={Mok, Lillio and Way, Samuel and Maystre, Lucas and Anderson, Ashton},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the {I}nternational {AAAI} {C}onference on {W}eb and {S}ocial {M}edia},
  year={2022}
}
Measuring Alignment of Online Grassroots Political Communities with Political Campaigns
Cameron Raymond, Isaac Waller, Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2022.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{raymond2022grassroots,
  title={Measuring Alignment of Online Grassroots Political Communities with Political Campaigns},
  author={Raymond, Cameron and Waller, Isaac and Anderson, Ashton},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the {I}nternational {AAAI} {C}onference on {W}eb and {S}ocial {M}edia},
  year={2022}
}
Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. Nature 2021.
BibTeX
@article{waller2020community,
  title={Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms},
  author={Waller, Isaac and Anderson, Ashton},
  journal={Nature},
  volume={600},
  number={7888},
  pages={264--268},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Nature Publishing Group}
}
Imagine All the People: Characterizing Social Music Sharing on Reddit
Venia Veselovsky, Isaac Waller, and Ashton Anderson. ICWSM 2021.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{veselovsky2021imagine,
  title={Imagine All the People: Characterizing Social Music Sharing on Reddit},
  author={Veselovsky, Veniamin and Waller, Isaac and Anderson, Ashton},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media},
  volume={15},
  pages={739--750},
  year={2021}
}
Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments
Kristina Gligorić, George Lifchits, Robert West, Ashton Anderson. PLOS One, 2021.
BibTeX
@article{gligoric2021linguistic,
  title={Linguistic effects on news headline success: Evidence from thousands of online field experiments (Registered Report Protocol)},
  author={Gligori{\'c}, Kristina and Lifchits, George and West, Robert and Anderson, Ashton},
  journal={Plos one},
  volume={16},
  number={9},
  pages={e0257091},
  year={2021},
  publisher={Public Library of Science San Francisco, CA USA}
}
Generalists and Specialists: Using Community Embeddings to Quantify Activity Diversity in Online Platforms
Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson. WWW 2019.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{waller2019generalists,
  title={Generalists and specialists: Using community embeddings to quantify activity diversity in online platforms},
  author={Waller, Isaac and Anderson, Ashton},
  booktitle={The World Wide Web Conference},
  pages={1954--1964},
  year={2019}
}