Lab on Innovation in Networks and Knowledge logo

We are a multidisciplinary lab directed by Professor Ágnes Horvát of Northwestern University, researching online spaces as heterogeneous complex networks comprising people, algorithmic platforms, institutions, AI and policies. Our scholarship focuses on how online spaces operate and can be designed to be more efficient, egalitarian, and enabling for scientists, entrepreneurs, and creative artists. 

Recent Work Spotlight

• LINK welcomes Dr. Miriam Schirmer as a postdoctoral fellow! Miriam got her PhD from the Technical University of Munich in Computational Social Science.
• Congratulations to LINK-graduate Dr. Henry Dambanemuya for starting his faculty position at the University of Chicago!
• Emőke-Ágnes Horvát serves as a guest editor for the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication special issue, ‘Gender Gaps in Digital Spaces’,  where she discusses how to quantify gender disparities and bias online.
• Katherine O’Toole and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát’ paper, Extending Human Creativity with AI, has been published in the Journal of Creativity‘s special issue, ‘AI and Creativity’.
• LINK has a forthcoming ICSWM paper, Emergent Influence Networks in Good-Faith Online Discussions, by Henry Dambanemuya, Daniel Romero, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát.
• The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference paper,  Understanding (Ir)rational Herding Online, by Henry Dambanemuya, Johannes Wachs , and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, examines social influence in herding behaviors on peer-to-peer lending platforms.
• Congratulations to Henry Dambanemuya for his recent internship at Dataminr this fall.
• ICWSM paper,  Information Retention in the Multi-platform Sharing of Science by Sohyeon Hwang, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, and Daniel M. Romero examines information loss in content being shared online across multiple platforms.
• The Web Conference (WWW ’23)  paper, Hidden Indicators of Collective Intelligence in Crowdfunding by Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, Henry Dambanemuya, Jayaram Uparna, and Brian Uzzi introduces new ways to model collective intelligence problems by using two universal variables to predict loan funding and default in peer-to-peer lending.
• EPJ Data Science paper Novelty and cultural evolution in modern popular music by Katherine O’Toole and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát explores underlying patterns in the relationship between musical novelty, popularity, and cultural evolution.
• LINK is excited to announce that we will be presenting a paper at CHI 2023;  Collaborative Creativity in TikTok Music Duets by Katherine O’Toole, which explores new methodological approaches for analyzing distributed creativity in digital systems.
• Congratulations to Katherine O’Toole for passing her CS Qualifying exam, Collaborative Creativity in TikTok Music Duets, which will be presented at CHI 2023.
• Julia Barnett and Henry Dambanemuya received best student paper awards at the International Conference on the Science of Science and Innovation (ICSSI) and the annual meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA), respectively.
• New preprints on arXiv about the gender gap in scholarly self-promotion on social media, experiments with hidden influences of funder behavior in crowdfunding, novelty and cultural change in modern popular music, and user engagement with retracted articles on Twitter.
• PNAS paper Dynamics of cross-platform attention to retracted papers by Hao Peng, Daniel Romero, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát examines how retracted papers are shared on social media, and is featured in Northwestern Now.
• How does virtual collaboration affect team creativity? In Nature News & Views,  Emőke-Ágnes Horvát and Brian Uzzi discuss new research that explores the impact of online communication on idea generation within remote teams.
• Congratulations to Henry K. Dambanemuya, who has been offered a summer ’22 internship at Microsoft. He will be hosted by Mengting Wan, Fereshte Khani, and Longqi Yang at the Office of Applied Research in the Experiences and Devices Group.
• Emőke-Ágnes Horvát will be presenting a talk at London School of Economics; Using Network Science and Machine Learning to Study Scientific Online Communication.
• Social Media + Society paper, Birds of a Feather Flock Together Online: Digital Inequality in Social Media Repertoires by Emőke-Ágnes Horvát and Eszter Hargittai explores the differences in user bases across different social media platforms.
• Emőke-Ágnes Horvát will be speaking on the subject of inequalities in online and social media communication at the following colloquium talks: Equity and quality: The case of online scholarly communication. Data Science/Computational Social Science Seminar Series.
• LINK in the News – A PNAS publication, Gender Inequities in the Online Dessemination of Scholars’ Work by Orsolya Vásárhelyi, Igor Zakhlebin, Stasa Milojevic, and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, has received press coverage for its discussion on bias in the online visibility of female scholars. [Select press coverage: EurekAlert!, Inside Higher Ed, The Science Advisory Board, Physics World, heidi.news]
• LINK in the News – A New Media & Society publication, Writer Movements Between News Outlets Reflect Political Polarization in Media by Nick Hagar, Johannes Wachs and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, has received press coverage for its analysis of how publishing patterns reflect political polarization in news media. [Select press coverage: Niskanen Center, RQ1, Der Tagesspiegel]
• CSCW paper A Multi-platform Study of Crowd Signals Associated with Successful Online Fundraising by Henry K Dambanemuya and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát looks at measuring crowd signals of successful fundraising online.
• LINK is excited to announce that we will be presenting a talk at the Society for Social Studies of Science 2021 Meeting :  Ontological Structures in Digital Music Platforms. Katherine O’Toole.
• LINK is excited to announce that we will be presenting two papers at Networks 2021 : Do Online Platforms Democratize Science? Gender Inequities in the Online Success of Scientists. Orsolya Vasarhelyi, Stasa Milojevic and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, and Network Approach to Countering Popularity Bias in Music Recommender Systems. Katherine O’Toole.
• Congratulations to LINK’s Henry Dambanemuya for being awarded the highly prestigious Presidential Fellowship! 2021 Presidential Fellowship Winners
• LINK is excited to announce that we will be presenting three papers at the 7th  International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2021):  An Experimental Study of the Effectiveness of Crowd Signals in Online Fundraising.  Henry Dambanemuya, Eunseo Choi, Darren Gergle and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát,  Analyzing Online Attention to Retracted Papers. Hao Peng, Daniel Romero and Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, and Novelty and Cultural Change in Modern Popular Music. Katherine O’Toole and  Emőke-Ágnes Horvát.
•  A new paper by LINK researchers, published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, looks at trends in online information sharing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic:  https://journalqd.org/article/view/2572/1808