Yingdan Lu

Assistant Professor
Department of Communication Studies
School of Communication
Northwestern University
Email: yingdan [at] northwestern.edu


COMputation Island (“计传岛” in Chinese) is a WeChat-based online platform for developing computational communication research (CCR) and computational social science research, founded by Yingdan Lu from Stanford University, and co-founded with Yiyan Zhang from Boston University and Zening Duan from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Since January 2021, COMputation Island team has created more than 60 original articles to share cutting-edge research, facilitate academic discussions, and promote resource exchanges to more than 10,000 Mandarin-speaking students and scholars in Asia, North America, Europe, and other regions, and the community is still growing. To build an influential community of young CCR scholars, COMputation Island invites outstanding CCR scholars to share their insights on CCR research and career trajectories. Some spotlight articles (in Chinese) are listed below:

Learning Computational Communication and Resources:

  • Learning Computational Communication: Ten Things You Need to Know (Article Link)
  • Recommended Readings for Computational Communication Research (Article Link)

Computational Methods and Digital Databases:

  • Screenomics: a New Method in Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Introduction to Digital News Databases (Article Link)
  • Using Twitter Data for Research: Tools, Costs, Skillsets and Lessons Learned (Article Link)
  • Applying Semantic Network Analysis to Analyze Online Text Corpora (Article Link)

Cutting-edge Research in Computational Social Science

  • Guided Readings for “Computational Social Science” Special Issue in Nature (Article Link)
  • Guided Readings for “Images as Data” Special Issue in Computational Communication Research (Article Link)
  • From World of Warcraft to Social Networks: Learning Pop Culture with Computational Communication (Article Link)

Interviews from Leading Scholars

  • Professor Jonathan Zhu: the Past, Present and Future of Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Professor Cuihua (Cindy) Shen: Doing Meaningful Research in Computational Communication (Article Link)
  • Professor Lei Guo: Classical Theory Meets Computational Method (Article Link)