Research

Social Network Analysis

My primary area of research is in social network analysis - a field of study that investigates social structures through ties of various strengths. While the field has been around for decades, I am excited to apply the principles to newer platforms, like Reddit and Facebook, to differentiate between organic communities and malicious networks that post misinformation. One of my main topics of study is pink slime, a type of inauthentic local news that has been spreading across the United States online news ecosystem.

As you might notice from my Github, I program in Python, but I particularly enjoy doing data analysis and app development (Shiny) in R. Most of my cursory data exploration is in hasty SQL queries which I typically forget to clean and comment before committing (sorry).

In 2020 I legally changed my name from Christine Marie Sowa to Christine Sowa Lepird - if you come across publications under either name that you like, it’s likely written by me.

Conference Talks and Publications

  • Christine Lepird, Anna Wu, and Kathleen M. Carley. Flying Under the Radar : How Smaller Social Media Groups Are More Susceptible to Misinformation. IDeaS Conference: Disinformation, Hate Speech, and Extremism Online. Pittsburgh, PA, September 2023.

  • Christine Lepird and Kathleen M. Carley. Comparison of Online Maneuvers by Authentic and Inauthentic Local News Organizations. IDeaS Conference: Disinformation, Hate Speech, and Extremism Online. Pittsburgh, PA, September 2023.

  • Catherine King, Christine Sowa Lepird, and Kathleen M. Carley, 2021, Project OMEN: Designing a Training Game to Fight Misinformation on Social Media. Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science, Institute for Software Research, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Technical Report CMU-ISR-21-110.

  • Sowa, Christine and Carley, Kathleen M. (2020). The Russian Strategy for Interference and Influence on Reddit: An Analysis of Infiltrating New Social Media Platforms. In Proceedings of the International Conference SBP-BRiMS 2020, Washington DC, October 2020, Springer.

  • Uyheng, Joshua & Magelinski, Thomas & Villa Cox, Ramon Alfonso & Sowa, Christine & Carley, Kathleen M. (2019). Interoperable pipelines for social cyber-security: assessing Twitter information operations during NATO Trident Juncture 2018. Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, 1-19. Springer.

  • SBP-BRiMS 2019: Fake News on Reddit: Spreading Disinformation to Diverse Communities.

  • INSNA 2017 NASN Conference: Presented independent research project into cross-network sentiment analysis analyzing social balance theory on Reddit.

Thesis Work

My thesis proposal will be held on February 26, 2024. The accompanying document can be found here .

Teaching and Mentoring

  • During the Spring 2023 semester, I TA’d Dynamic Network Analysis under Prof. Kathleen M. Carley at CMU.
  • In the Summer of 2023, I supervised an intern who I collaborated with to analyze social media news sharing during the 2022 U.S. Midterms. I’ve enjoyed mentoring two more interns when I was a researcher at JHU APL.

School Projects

  • I made this website to analyze what the Russian Internet Research Agency was doing on Reddit around the time of the 2016 election for my Interactive Data Science class in the Fall of 2019.