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Aaron Shaw is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University, co-founder of the Community Data Science Collective, and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

Aaron studies participatory organizations and online communities, especially peer production communities (like Wikipedia). Much of his work considers why and how a few online community projects grow and produce high quality public resources when most do not. He has also investigated inequalities in online participation, participation in the gig economy, and online governance.


Publications

Publication
Mar 20, 2011

Designing Incentives for Inexpert Human Raters

This paper presents the results of an experiment comparing the effects of social, financial, and hybrid incentive schemes on worker performance in an online labor market (Amazon's…

Publication
Apr 27, 2010

A Tale of Two Blogospheres: Discursive Practices on the Left and Right

This paper compares the practices of discursive production and participation among top U.S. political blogs on the left, right, and center during the summer of 2008 and finds…


News

Oct 15, 2013

Shaw and Benkler win Best Published Article Award in Information Technology and Politics from the APSA

Berkman fellow Aaron Shaw and faculty member Yochai Benkler have won the Best Published Article Award in Information Technology and Politics published in 2012 from the American…

May 25, 2011

61st Annual Conference of the International Communication Association

Attending ICA 2011 this week and trying to figure out which sessions to take in? A number of Berkman Center people are also participating in ICA 2011...


Community

Science

Social media, extremism, and radicalization

BKC Faculty Associate Aaron Shaw discusses the connection between social media platforms and extremist movements. 

Aug 30, 2023

Events

Jan 21, 2014 @ 12:30 PM

Internet Skills and Wikipedia's Gender Inequality

with Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw, Northwestern University

Eszter and Aaron will speak about their research on the normal, daily use of the web as well as organization and mobilization within web communities.

Feb 22, 2011 @ 12:30 PM

The Internet, Young Adults and Political Participation around the 2008 Presidential Elections

Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw, Berkman Fellows

Based on unique survey data of a diverse group or young adults with unusually high representation of racial and ethnic minorities from Spring 2009, Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw…

Event
Jul 7, 2009 @ 12:30 PM

HIT me baby one more time, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazon Mechanical Turk

Aaron Shaw, Berkman Center Fellow

Aaron Shaw will discuss who's using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, its implications for social scientists, the future of labor markets, and life on the Internet as we know it.

Event
May 20, 2009 @ 6:00 PM

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group

Aaron Shaw - Polanyi's Penguin? Commons-Based Industry in the Neoliberal Knowledge Economy; Colleen Kaman - The World in the Network; Rasmus Kleis Nielsen - Mundane Tools and…