Aaron Shaw

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. I am a member of the Community Data Science Collective, which I founded together with Benjamin Mako Hill. During 2017-2018, I held a Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University.

At Northwestern, I mentor Ph.D. students in the Media, Technology & Society (MTS) and Technology and Social Behavior (TSB) programs. I am also affiliated with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D), the Sociology Department, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Buffett Center.

I study organization, collaboration, and mobilization online. Most of my current projects try to understand why and how a few peer production communities (like Wikipedia) grow when most do not. I also work on understanding who participates (and who doesn't) in these contexts.

My research has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation (IIS-1617468 and IIS-1910202), the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, Protocol Labs, the Ewing and Marion Kaufman Foundation, FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, the University of California Office of the President, and the United States Department of Education.

I completed my Ph.D in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Some of my previous research has compared the participatory infrastructures of the U.S. political blogosphere; investigated the origins of Free Software policies in Brazil; and analyzed applications of crowdsourcing for both social scientific research and humanitarian crisis relief.

If you'd like to read more, here's my CV and links to papers are on my research page. You might also take a look at my Google Scholar profile page. For more information, copies of papers, or just to say hello, please send me an email. If you're on the Northwestern campus and you're trying to find me, my office is room 1-140 in the Frances Searle Building, which can be a bit of a labyrinth.