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Brian Keeganis a computational social scientist and post-doctoral fellow at
Northeastern University. He is also an affiliate at the Berkman Center
for Internet & Society and Institute for Quantitative Social Scienceat Harvard University. His research examines how temporary online
organizations emerge, stabilize, dissolve, and regenerate. He uses
methods in network analysis, multilevel statistics, and data
visualization to analyze large databases of social behavior such as Wikipedia article revision histories, anonymized Threadless users behavior, and player interactions in massively multiplayer online games.
Brian holds a PhD and Masters degree from the Northwestern University's program in Media, Technology, and Society. He was jointly advised by Noshir Contractor and Darren Gergle and his committee members included Brian Uzzi and Daniel Gruber. He received bachelors degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Science, Technology, and Society from MIT in 2006.
His dissertationexamined how Wikipedia users collaborated to cover breaking news events
around natural disasters, accidents, and political change. This project
has implications for supporting high-tempo online peer production in
contexts like disaster response and national security. Brian's also
researches the social organization of online clandestine activity like
gold farmers in massively multiplayer online games and the structure of
collaborations in creative crowdsourcing sites like Threadless.
Brian has published and presented over a dozen
articles in a variety of journals and conferences such as American
Behavioral Scientist, New Media & Society, ACM Computer Supported
Cooperative Work, AAAI Weblogs and Social Media, and IEEE Social
Computing as well as receiving best paper recognition from the
International Communication Association, ACM Web Science, and ACM
Computer Supported Cooperative Work.