Focusing on gender equity, Dr Siân Brooke (she/her) will demonstrate how computational methods can be rehabilitated into critical social science. Building on her recent study on the popular programming forum Stack Overflow, Dr Brooke will show how she incorporated anonymity and non-binary gender into her large-scale study of sexism. Complimenting such computational work, Dr Brooke will also discuss her forthcoming publication into humour and sharing memes at hackathons, which examines the masculine characters of Incels, Virgins, and Nice Guys. Dr Brooke will highlight that the path from social to data science is not simple or one-way, but rather computational researchers have much to learn from the richness of qualitative enquiry.

Dr Brooke is a Fellow in Computational Social Science and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE) Department of Methodology. She is a Research Associate at the OII and affiliated with the Data Science Institute at LSE. She also holds awards from the British Academy, CIVICA, and Alan Turing Institute. Her research focuses on gender and equity, focusing on socialising in programming and the role of humour in Internet communities.