Viviana Chiu Sik Wu, assistant professor of public policy, released a new study titled "Leveraging computational methods for nonprofit social media research: a systematic review and methodological framework" in the Journal of Chinese Governance. In the study, she conducted a systematic review of 43 studies that analyzed social media data from philanthropic and nonprofit organizations. She then devised and tested a computational model that pairs supervised machine learning with human oversight to analyze content more effectively.
This new model, which Wu calls "extreme boosting," allows researchers to harness the power of machine learning to analyze significantly more data while limiting bias and noise through researcher input. While Wu states that the model requires further refinement to achieve higher accuracy, it already shows a promising future for aiding researchers in analyzing larger and larger digital datasets.