Media Rurality
Megan Wiessner, DTD Lab postdoc, has contributed a chapter to a new book investigating the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings. The book will be released in mid-April and can be pre-ordered now.
How will chatbots and AI-generated content influence the 2026 elections?
David Nemer, DTD Lab faculty co-lead, contributed to a new report by the newspaper O Globo about the influence of Chatbots and AI-generated content in the 2026 elections.
Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It’s embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
The Boundaries of Evidence-based Policymaking for Night-time Governance
Jess Reia, DTD Lab faculty co-lead, has a new paper out in which they examine the challenges posed by big data and AI-generated content to decision-making processes.
Digital construction comes to the Pacific Northwest: Timber and the landscapes of automation
Megan Wiessner, DTD Lab postdoctoral research fellow, has contributed an article to an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) special issue, "Automation by Design: Politics, Culture and Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn".
Online propagation of emotions: A study of resharing dynamics on social media following celebrity suicides
Ehsan Nouri, DTD Lab postdoctoral research fellow, co-authors a paper about emotional contagion on social media, particularly following shocking and tragic events, which often unfolds through widespread resharing, amplifying affective responses that are typically intense and negative.
The Measured Body
Mona Sloane, DTD Lab faculty co-lead, and co-authors argue that redesigning motion capture systems to be more representative of real human bodies and movements could make them fairer and more useful for applications such as law enforcement and medical diagnostics.
AI’s Sociological Era
In an introduction to a new Social Science Computer Review Special Issue "What Is Sociological About AI?", Mona Sloane, faculty co-lead of the DTD Lab, outlines how AI’s cultural meanings, material effects, political entanglements, reliance on human labor and data, and embeddedness in status and power make it a fundamentally sociological phenomenon.
On the controversiality of AI: The controversy is not the situation
Mona Sloane, faculty co-lead of the DTD Lab, is among the contributors to a new publication emerging from the Shaping AI project published in Big Data & Society. The piece reflects on a central question that shaped the project: Do public controversies about AI actually matter—and do they meaningfully influence how AI becomes embedded in society?
New Public Database Brings Transparency to AI Tools Used in Hiring
Artificial intelligence is increasingly shaping how people are hired, yet few understand how these systems actually work. A new project from Sloane Lab at the University of Virginia School of Data Science and College of Arts and Sciences aims to change that.
