QSS post-doctoral fellow involved in research on political extremism
Annie Chen is a fellow in the Program in Quantitative Social Science at Dartmouth College. After completing a BA in Political Science at the University of Toronto and an MA in Political Science at McGill University, Annie joined the Bright Line Watch team at Dartmouth. Since that time, she has worked on surveys about democratic erosion in the United States, investigated the consumption of extremist content on YouTube, and is now gearing up to field an experiment to test the effect of news feed algorithms on engagement with misinformation with researchers at the University of South Florida.
Although Annie had been introduced to quantitative methods in her undergraduate degree, she did not fully appreciate how quantitative techniques could be applied to a range of social science questions until she became actively involved in research during her graduate education. Annie is especially grateful to her mentor at McGill, Professor Aaron Erlich (a Dartmouth alum), for providing her opportunities to develop her data analysis abilities and computational skills. She is thrilled to be able to continue sharpening these skills at Dartmouth through diverse projects and alongside incredible collaborators.
Annie works closely with Brendan Nyhan and the John Carey , who are co-directors of Bright Line Watch, a group of scholars focusing on the health of democracy in the United States. According to Professor Nyhan, "Annie is an incredible data scientist who has been essential to the success of our joint research on YouTube and the effect of algorithmic rankings on exposure to quality information online." Professor Carey adds, "Annie has been a huge asset to Bright Line Watch. She's smart, careful, and creative and she has great instincts for how to communicate quantitative results visually. Bright Line's work is a lot better for having Annie on board." Anne is a co-author of the recent Bright Line Watch report, "American democracy at the start of the Biden presidency"
Annie is one of two fellows in residence at QSS this year. The other is Anthony Sirianni, a sociologist who is teaching a course this spring on network analysis.