Charles Chang

Areas of interest: Computational Social Science; Political Communication; Chinese Studies; Digital Humanities. Region: China. Charles Chang earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, was elected as the 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at Stanford, and served as Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue in 2017-2018. His research focuses on political communication in contemporary China. With the rise of the internet, smartphones, and social media, social science is becoming increasingly computational and often involves the collection and analysis of massive data. One type of study he has undertaken is to see how Chinese internet users, who number more than 700 million, respond to an unprecedented political event, such as the most recent announcements of corruption at the highest level of government. Chang pioneered a method of graphing such that he could follow citizen response to each official announcement of the political event at a micro-spatial granularity and, time wise, from day to day and even from moment to moment. Another type of study required him to solve the problem of scarce or inaccessible data in China, an authoritarian state that holds information close to its chest. Starting with maps that offered little useful information, Chang pioneered techniques that enabled him to fill in the gaps and show urban land in considerable detail, including the location, size, and compactness of different communities, which in turn gave him the means to gain knowledge of the social status of the people within each, how they communicate and behave. At Stanford, he taught a seminar on the methods of “computational social science” and “digital humanities” to graduate students in which he explored how its methods can be used to study China. As to his present and future projects, they include a book that introduces computational social science to a broader social science public, and, more specifically, the use of its methods to the understanding of religion in China, a project that takes him closer to the humanities. Chang will teach the seminar “Digital China: Using Computational Methods to Illuminate Society, Politics, Culture, and History” in Fall 2018.