If your’re this far, you got the 127 Hours reference from the welcome page. No more morbid jokes; here is a bit about how David do (zefrank, anyone?).
To view an up-to-date list of current projects, see the Project Pipeline.
For more information on any data and manuscripts, see my GitHub repository or CV.
For recent appearances in the news, see Media Mentions.
Recent publications include “A Slap or a Jab” where political Facebook posts were manipulated with insulting or mocking comments. The paper outlines the theoretical distinctions between these two concepts; the results show mocking gets more of a rise and prompts greater engagement than insults, for morally-salient topics.
In press at Mass Comm. & Society (expected late 2018), David and co-authors test agenda setting effects during the 2016 presidential campaign and the public’s role in agenda promotion through social media. Endorsements rates were modeled using multilevel spline regression to track changes after important events. During key points in a campaign, Facebook reactions follow predictable, partisan patterns of promoting favorable in-group coverage and depressing disadvantageous news.
Despite the published works, David is not merely a Facebook researcher. Conference presentations and papers under review include research on uncivil and corrective comments after news articles, effects of design elements on a discussion forum’s conversational norms, analysis of Reddit health groups, and a bit of virtual reality research.
The core of his research is not the tech, but how people use these new tools, and with a critical eye, how these new tools use people. There is a social psychology and intergroup communication bent to most of his research. Primary methods include experimental design, collecting and analyzing social media behaviors, building measurement instruments, and creating a few bots, apps, and scripts.
He speaks R, MPlus, SAS, SPSS, and enough Python and Unix to break something.
These research interests permeate David’s teaching. In each of the courses listed on his CV, David seeks to foster a public with robust skills able to interact with and build a complex digital social world while continuing a tradition of scientific inquiry and shared knowledge.
Back to first, person: I currently studies at Washington State University’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication and will complete my Ph.D. in communication and minor in applied statistics in the spring of 2019. Until then, I am Vice President of the WSU Graduate and Professional Student Association, manage the Murrow VR Lab, and research political communication in digital spaces.
David E. Silva 