Digital Methods

#190: Temporal Validity, Knowledge Decay, and the Meta 2020 Election Research Partnership, with Dr. Kevin Munger

November 30, 2025 Academics

Dr. Kevin Munger, Assistant Professor and Chair of Computational Social Science in the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, discusses the concept of temporal validity in social media research. Dr. Munger breaks down why thinking about time is an important component of meta-science, particularly when it comes to evaluating the methodologies of social media research. 

 

We also discuss the Meta 2020 Election Research partnership, new pathways in social media research, the logic of quantitative description, and the challenges of political communication in the current grant funding and interdisciplinary landscape of political research. 

 

Here are the two articles we discuss in the episode: 

Temporal Validity as Meta-Science (2023)

What Did We Learn about Political Communication from the Meta2020 Partnership? (2024)

 

And links to Dr. Munger’s latest books:

The YouTube Apparatus (2024)

The Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture (2022)

#111: Data Science across Academia, Industry, and Progressive Campaigns, with Dr. Solomon Messing

August 9, 2020 Academics

Dr. Solomon Messing, Chief Scientist at ACRONYM and Affiliated Researcher at Georgetown University, shares his insights on data science across academia, the tech industry, and political campaigning space. We discuss how computational social science methods have changed over time, and how system architectures can be built to protect social media users’ privacy. We also chat about current trends that Dr. Messing is observing at ACRONYM relating to the persuasiveness and cost of political ads on social media. 

Here’s the paper we discuss on differential privacy, and the Facebook URLs Dataset Codebook.