Project Overview
Public representatives (e.g., elected officials, agency heads) are often granted special status online, including facing less stringent rules on platforms and enjoying higher baseline followings than private individuals. Digital communication is increasingly important for public officials who want to engage with a broad audience, especially for those officials who do not have substantial communication resources and/or major followings in the traditional news media. Digital engagement by public officials can play constructive roles such as informing the public on important issues, and inspiring substantial contributions to the public good. They can also, however, serve destructive forces such as intentionally misleading the public, or even encouraging political violence. We conduct research, including the dissemination of measurement and data tools, related to the digital activity of elected officials in the U.S. federal government, state governments, and the 100 largest cities. We develop and apply quantitative measures that can be used to assess dimensions of DAPR on a large scale.
Funding for the DAPR Project is generally provided by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation.
For any questions about the DAPR Project, email the project director, Bruce Desmarais, at bdesmarais@psu.edu.
Lead Investigators
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Bruce Desmarais Bruce Desmarais is the DeGrandis-McCourtney Early Career Professor in Political Science, Director of the Center for Social Data Analytics, and a Co-Hire of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State University. |
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Yu-Ru Lin Yu-Ru Lin is an associate professor at School of Computing and Information, University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Lin is interested in studying social and political networks, as well as computational and visualization methods for understanding network data. |
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Kevin Munger Kevin Munger is the Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor of Political Science and Assistant Professor of Political Science and Social Data Analytics at Penn State University. He studies the communication of political information on the internet, and how to make digital social science make sense. |
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Sarah Rajtmajer Sarah Rajtmajer is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University and core faculty at Penn State’s Rock Ethics Institute. Her work leverages machine learning and mathematical modeling to understand trust and confidence in information. . |
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Advisory Board
- Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica: In her journalism, Damon focuses on government accountability. Prior to ProPublica, she also wrote for the Reno Gazette Journal and USA Today Network.
- Joel Jacobs, ProPublica: Jacobs is a Data reporter at ProPublica. Prior to ProPublica, Jacobs wrote for The Washington Post and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
- Bill McCarthy, Agence France- Presse North America: McCarthy is Reporter at Agence France-Presse North America covering misinformation, the media, and politics.
- Katherine Ognyanova, Rutgers University: Dr. Ognyanova is an Associate Professor of Communication who studies the effects of social influence on civic and political behavior, confidence in institutions, information exposure/evaluation, and public opinion formation.
- Jeanette Sutton, University at Albany, SUNY: Dr. Sutton is an Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity at the University at Albany, SUNY. A sociologist by training, she specializes in disaster and risk, with a primary focus on online informal communications.