Nathan TeBlunthuis

Assistant Professor (beginning August 1, 2024)

School of Information
University of Texas at Austin

I am a computational social scientist who studies online collective action in projects like Wikipedia, online communities like Reddit, and social movements. I am very happy to be joining the Information School at the University of Texas at Austin as an Assistant Professor of Social Informatics in August 2024.

An important and serious methodological problem affects a huge range of research in computational social science: When you use a machine learning algorithm to automatically classify a variable, and then you use that variable as an input to a statistical procedure such as a regression, the errors and biases of the algorithm contaminate the downstream analysis. Predictiveness metrics such as precision and recall do not guarantee validity. My article forthcoming in Communication Methods and Measures with Dr. Valarie Hase and Dr. Chun-Hong Chan shows that statistical methods can use validation data to correct the downstream analysis. Try out the R package.

Many people invoke “ecosystem” as metaphor to emphasize complexity and interdependence in communication systems like the Internet. However, there is also a huge natural science called “ecology” which successfully learns about biological ecosystems. Organizational sociologists and communication scientists have already appropriated theories, models and methods from ecology to understand interdependence between human organizations like firms and social movements. I draw both from these social science literatures and from bio-ecology to understand how environmental contexts and interdependence between online communities shapes their growth, survival and organizing processes.

In my ICWSM 2022 paper with Benjamin Mako Hill, I use time series analysis to infer when overlapping online communities hosted on Reddit are competitors or mutualists and find that mutualism is much more common than competition. To help explain why overlapping communities are often mutualists, my collaborators and I interviewed members of these overlapping online communities. As described in our CSCW 2022 paper, people seek different types of benefits from online communities such as a like-minded community, specific information and an audience for their content. Tensions between the different benefits mean that "no community can do everything," but one can obtain a greater range of benefits from a portfolio of overlapping communities.

My research also investigates quality control and machine learning systems in peer production. My paper published in CHI 2017 with Aaron Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill shows that quality control systems often become increasingly hostile to newcomers and difficult to change over time. These mechanisms, which limit Wikipedia's growth and diversity, are common in a range of digitally mediated forms of organizing. Online organizations increasingly use data science methods as a part of their quality control systems. In my CSCW 2021 paper with Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Halfaker, I used a regression discontinuity analysis to evaluate how algorithms for flagging encyclopedia edits shape the fairness of Wikipedia moderation. I also introduce an improved machine learning method for measuring Wikipedia article quality in my OpenSym 2021 paper .

My academic work has received generous support from the National Science Foundation through the Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) and through the cyber-human systems program.

I was previously a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, and before that at the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. I completed my PhD in Communication at the University of Washington. In the past, I worked at Microsoft where I developed search suggestions for Bing multimedia and as a technician at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) where I measured foaming molten glass as part of a project to store nuclear waste. I went to college at Whitworth University where I received a double-B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2012.

Publications

Peer-reviewed publications

The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Fediverse

Carl Colglazier, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media — ICWSM 2024 [Proc. ICWSM] [Arxiv Repository]
Misclassification in Automated Content Analysis Causes Bias in Regression. Can We Fix It? Yes We Can!

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Valerie Hase, Chung-Hong Chan

Communication Methods and Measures [DOI] [Arxiv Repository]
Identifying Competition and Mutualism Between Online Groups

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Benjamin Mako Hill

International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media — ICWSM 2022 [Proc. ICWSM] [Arxiv Repository]
No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Overlapping Online Communities

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, Benjamin Mako Hill

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction — CSCW 2022 [ACM DL] [Arxiv Repository]
Measuring Wikipedia Article Quality in One Dimension

Nathan TeBlunthuis

Proc. of the 17th International Symposium on Open Collaboration — OpenSym 2021 [ACM DL] [Arxiv Repository]
Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Wikipedia

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Halfaker

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction — CSCW 2021 [ACM DL] [Arxiv Repository]
Dwelling on Wikipedia: Investigating Time Spent by Global encyclopedia Readers.

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Tilman Bayer, Olga Vasileva

Proc. of the 15th International Symposium on Open Collaboration — OpenSym 2019 [ACM DL]
All Talk: How Increasing Interpersonal Communication on Wikis May Not Enhance Productivity.

Sneha Narayan, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Wm Salt Hale, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Aaron Shaw

Proceedings of the ACM: Human-Computer Interaction — CSCW 2019 [ACM DL]
Revisiting "The Rise and Decline" in a Population of Peer Production Projects

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI 2018 [ACM DL]
WINACS: construction and analysis of web-based computer science information networks

Tim Weninger, Marina Danilevsky, Fabio Fumarola, Joshua Hailpern, Jiawei Han, Thomas J Johntson, Surya Kallumadi, Hyungsul Kim, Zhijin Li, David McCloskey, Yizhou Sun, Nathan E TeGrotenhuis, Chi Wang, Xiao Yu

ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of data — SIGMOD 2011 [ACM DL]
Conversion of batch to molten glass, II: Dissolution of quartz particles

Pavel Hrma, José Marcial, Kevin J Swearingen, Samuel H Henager, Michael J Schweiger, Nathan E TeGrotenhuis

Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids — 2010 [ScienceDirect]
Cluster Formation of Silica Particles in Glass Batches During Melting

Michael J Schweiger, Pavel Hrma, Carissa J Humrickhouse, José Marcial, Brian J Riley, Nathan E TeGrotenhuis.

Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids — 2010 [ScienceDirect]
Effect of Glass-Batch Makeup on the Melting Process

Pavel Hrma, Michael J Schweiger, Carissa J Humrickhouse, J Adam Moody, Rachel M Tate, Timothy T Rainsdon, Nathan E Tegrotenhuis, Benjamin M Arrigoni, Jose Marcial, Carmen P Rodriguez, Benjamin H Tincher.

Ceramics-Silikaty — 2010 [Ceramics Silikaty]

Published Extended Abstracts

Density Dependence Without Resource Partitioning: Population Ecology on Change.org.

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill

Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing — CSCW ’17 Companion [ACM DL ]

Book Chapters

Big Data

Nathan TeBlunthuis, Andrea Ceron (Ed.)

Encyclopedia of Technology & Politics — Edward Elgar Publishing — 2022 [preprint pdf ]

Theses

Ecology of Online Communities

PhD Thesis, University of Washington — 2021 [UW Digital Libraries ]
Density Dependence without Resource Partitioning on an Online Petitioning Platform

Master's Thesis, University of Washington — 2017 [UW Digital Libraries ]