Next CURE seminar and special book-signing event: Friday, October 17th, 2014!

Please join us for our next seminar and book signing event:

Gang Nostalgia: Generation, Authority and
the Role of History in a Chicago Gang

Laurence Ralph, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Departments of African and African American Studies
and of Anthropology
Harvard University

Friday, October 17, 2014
12pm – 2pm
Private Dining Room Campus Center
Lunch will be served

Laurence Ralph is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.He earned both a PhD and also a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology and Society. Laurence has a diverse set of research interests, which include: urban anthropology, medical anthropology; the study of gangs, disability, masculinity, race, and popular culture. Laurence has published articles on these topics in Anthropological Theory, Disability Studies Quarterly, Transition, and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. (more…)

CURE affiliated scholar Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn’s research on Twitter and Religion cited in MIT Technology Review

Twitter Data Mining Reveals America’s Religious Fault Lines

Social media is playing an increasingly important role in religious activity. Computer scientists ask: How is that reflected in the Twitter stream?

For the entire article, please visit: http://bit.ly/1twZyF6

Center Director Paul Jargowsky participates in Roundtable discussion on Ferguson

Watch the event hosted by the new Digital Studies Center at Rutgers-Camden by visiting: http://bit.ly/1pu1LQa

CURE affiliated scholar Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn co-authors paper on U.S. Religious Landscape on Twitter for the 6th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2014)

U.S. Religious Landscape on Twitter

Lu Chen, Ingmar Weber, Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn

Religiosity is a powerful force shaping human societies, affecting domains as diverse as economic growth or the ability to cope with illness. As more religious leaders and organizations as well as believers start using social networking sites (e.g., Twitter, Facebook), online activities become important extensions to traditional religious rituals and practices. However, there has been lack of research on religiosity in online social networks. This paper takes a step toward the understanding of several important aspects of religiosity on Twitter, based on the analysis of more than 250k U.S. users who self-declared their religions/belief, including Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism. Specifically, (i) we examine the correlation of geographic distribution of religious people between Twitter and offline surveys. (ii) We analyze users’ tweets and networks to identify discriminative features of each religious group, and explore supervised methods to identify believers of different religions. (iii) We study the linkage preference of different religious groups, and observe a strong preference of Twitter users connecting to others sharing the same religion.

CURE affiliated scholar Louis Tuthill quoted in local news

Dr. Louis Tuthill (assistant professor, CFAS-criminal justice) offered expert perspective on law enforcement strategies; his comments formed the majority of this news story. (more…)