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MMTCs DMI Research Seminar - Models, Misfires, and Meaningful Nulls: Computational Explorations in Platform Governance Research

MMTC's DMI Research Seminar – Models, Misfires, and Meaningful Nulls: Computational Explorations in Platform Governance Research

Presented by Maria Arango-Kure

In this seminar, Maria opens the garage door on their computational workflow. Drawing on a longitudinal study of platform governance, they present three modelling efforts: a multi class transformer classifier for identifying organizational values in corporate text, a clickbait classifier to trace editorial shifts over time, and embedding based topic models for analysing legitimation strategies.

Maria walks through what worked, what did not, and what remains to be seen. Going over the practical decisions behind each approach, including corpus construction, annotation, model selection, parameter tuning, and validation, and what happens when the computational part runs beautifully but the interpretive work reveals that there is, substantively, nothing there.

The session creates space for an honest conversation about operationalizing abstract concepts, diagnosing model behaviour, and interpreting meaningful null results in computational platform research.

Date & time: March 4th, 13:15–14:45 (online)
Zoom link: Register for the seminar via the DMI website here  https://datamethodsinitiative.org/ 

The Data Methods Initiative is a collaborative academic group committed to fostering innovation in social science research - Our seminars provide a space for researchers to share their work, explore innovative data methods, and engage in meaningful discussions. Each session lasts 90 minutes, combining a deep dive into the research context with a behind-the-scenes look at the practical challenges and solutions involved in applying these methods. Find out more https://datamethodsinitiative.org/