Chau Tong, Ph.D.

Chau Tong, Ph.D.

Computational Social Scientist

Teaching

My teaching experience at undergraduate and graduate levels

Cornell University

Research Methods for Social Networks and Social Media - Guest Lecturer

I was invited to give two workshops to graduate students of COMM 6750 - Research Methods for Social Networks and Social Media in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. The graduate course aims to develop students’ ability to use network methods and computational techniques to gather and analyze data to advance communication theories.

  • A primer to the Twitter API v2 for Academic Research, * October 27, 2021 * Lecture slides * Codes

This workshop guides students to deploy the Twitter Academic API to collect publicly available tweets for research, data exploration and visualization. Students were also taught best practices in dealing with big data issues, including nested data format, unstructured text data, rate limit and memory.

  • Topic modelling and Word Embedding Analysis in R, * November 17, 2021 * Lecture materials

This workshop uses news coverage on the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as examples, to illustrate how text mining approaches, in particular topic modelling (LDA and STM) and word embeddings, can be used to understand public discourse. Students were introduced to R packages such as quanteda, topicmodels, stm and word2vec and walked through supervised and unsupervised methods to analyze text data.

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Introduction to Mass Communication - Teaching Assistant

J201: Introduction to Mass Communication course is a key undergraduate course that introduces undergraduate students to key theories and concepts in journalism, strategic communication, public relations and advertising. It is a prerequisite Communication B requirement class for students who want to enter the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison to pursue a career in the news, advertising, PR industry. I taught 36 - 40 students each Fall and Spring semester from 2014 through 2018, helped them develop and foster their writing and public speaking skills. I also moderated theme-based discussions in discussion sessions, which touched upon current events, and discourses of social and political issues in the media.

Mass Media in Multicultural America - Graduate Teaching Assistant

J162: Mass Media in Multicultural America is an intermediate-level undergraduate course that aims to stimulate thoughts on important topics surrounding contemporary issues in American society, including media depictions and portrayals of racial and ethnic minorities, race relations, cultures, diversity and inclusion, and the impact of such media portrayals on audiences’ perceptions and attitudes. I worked with 100-120 students and engaged them in open and deep discussions broadly related to the theme of the course via the course’s online discussion forums.

Online Communication and Interpersonal Relationships - Graduate Course Reader

CA345: Online Communication and Interpersonal Relationships course is an undergraduate course that introduces students to the emerging body of scholarship on how, and to what effects, people use these technologies to manage personal relationships. Each week, students examine a technological platform (e.g., Instagram, Snapchat, online dating, online discussion forums) and discuss how relationship dynamics are shaped by this platform. For instance, how do people form impressions of others when communicating through purely textual media? In what ways do social network sites improve and hurt romantic relationships?

My responsibilities include providing feedback and grading 2 exams and 3 assignments (2 pages each) for 60 students throughout the semester.