About me
I am an Assistant Professor in the Division of Computational Social Science at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
My research is broadly concerned with computational social science, social networks, and digital society. I use computational methods, network analysis, machine learning, digital trace data, and large language models to study public opinion, online political communication, platform governance, social status, and cultural markets.
Much of my work asks how social structures and digital environments shape what people see, say, value, and collectively respond to. Empirically, my projects draw on settings such as online discussion platforms, public opinion surveys, cultural production networks, and scientific collaboration.
Research Areas
Computational Measurement and Public Opinion: I am interested in how computational methods, including large language models, can be used to measure social and political attitudes. My current work examines LLM-based public opinion imputation, variance preservation, and the validation of computational measurement against conventional statistical approaches.
Online Political Communication and Platform Governance: I study how political events and platform interventions shape online discussion. Some of my ongoing projects examine the structure of online conversations, the shift from broadcasting to user-to-user interaction, and the structural consequences of content moderation in discussion trees.
Status, Inequality, and Cultural Markets: I examine how status hierarchies, collaboration networks, and attention dynamics emerge in cultural markets. My work on Korean hip-hop collaboration networks studies preferential attachment, status advantage, activity constraints, and the diffusion of ideas in cultural production.
Social Networks and Computational Methods: I also work on methodological issues in network analysis and computational social science, including the comparison of network structures, the measurement of latent social hierarchy, and the interpretation of commonly used network indicators.
Prospective Students
I welcome inquiries from students interested in computational social science, social network analysis, online political communication, cultural markets, AI for social research, platform governance, and computational measurement. Students with backgrounds in sociology, communication, political science, computer science, statistics, data science, or related fields are encouraged to get in touch.
Potential projects may involve digital trace data, online discussion data, network analysis, machine learning, large language models, public opinion measurement, platform governance, or cultural market dynamics.
My name in Chinese is 李宇杰. I am not active on social media platforms such as X/Twitter, Facebook, or Weibo.