Nga Than
PhD Student
Sociology Program
City University of New York - The Graduate Center

Nga Than is a doctoral candidate in the Sociology program at City University of New York – The Graduate Center. She is currently a Mellon digital publics fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center, a research affiliate at University of Buffalo, and a podcast and research affiliate at Queens Podcast Lab. Her writings on Sociology & AI appear frequently at Montreal AI Ethics Institute. Her research interests are in computational social science, social media, international migration, entrepreneurship, and work & occupations. As a mixed methods scholar, she has conducted qualitative research using interviewing, and participant observation, as well as employed methodological developments in machine learning to analyze text data, and administrative data. Her research has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Taiwan's Huayu Enrichment Scholarship, CUNY - Pre-dissertation Fellowship, CUNY - Doctoral Student Research Grant, and CUNY - Provost's Digital Innovation Grant.

[CV]     [CUNY Profile]     [Google Scholar]            

Research

  • Vietnamese Female Marriage Migrants in Taiwan: This research investigates the adaptation strategies of female marriage migrants, who marry Taiwanese men, and resettle in Taiwan. It asks the questions: what factors influence their adaptation? what are the obstacles? what helps them get integrated into the mainstream society?

  • Artisanal Food Entrepreneurs in New York's New Economy: Using the production of consumption approach, we examine how cultural products (in this case artisanal food items) are created, distributed, and advertised.

  • Content Creators: This research study examines the people, practices, and social relations that determine the success of content creation enterprises on Web 2.0 platforms. We are studying bloggers, podcasters, Instragrammers, YouTubers, and other content creators as media entrepreneurs in a new and growing part of the culture industry. We want to know how they get ideas, create content, connect with audiences, and sustain themselves as ongoing enterprises.

  • Platform-Mediated Work Management: This research examines online discourses generated by gig workers. We use computational social science techniques to analyze a large corpus of text data.

Selected Publications

  • 2021. Welcome to Gab! (Forthcoming, with Maria Rodriguez, Friederike Windel, and Diane Yoong) [Link]

  • 2020. "Community and the Digital Classroom." Blog. The Center for The Humanities. CUNY - The Graduate Center. [Link]

  • 2020. "Visualizing the Urban." The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. [Link]

  • 2020. Algorithmic Boss in the New Economy. Review of Uberland by Alex Rosenblat. Sociological Forum. [Link]

  • 2020. Review of The Extreme Gone Mainstream: Commercialization and Far Right Youth Culture in Germany , by C. Miller-Idriss. European Journal sof Cultural and Political Sociology. [Link]

  • 2019. Review of A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona, by E.Castañeda. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 44(2), 199-202. [Link]

Manuscripts in Progress

  • Individual-Organization-Society Alignment in Content Moderation (Under Review)

  • Have you tried Neural Topic Models? Comparative Analysis of Neural and Non-Neural Topic Models with Application to COVID-19 Twitter Data (Under Review)

  • Between Two Crises: Artisanal Food Startup Founders in New York (Article)

  • The Privacy Conundrum: An empirical examination of barriers to privacy among Indian social media users (Article, with Abhishek Gupta, Ameen Jauhar)

  • #Hanau: Twitter User Reactions to a White Nationalist Shooting in Germany (Article under Review with Friederike Windel, Krystal Perkins, and Maria Rodriguez)

  • #WomensMarch: A Deep Neural Network Approach (Article, with Maria Rodriguez, Diane Yoong, Heather Storer, and Jama Shelton)

  • Investigating the impact of protective factors and alternative service outcomes in child welfare predictive analytics applications: A Random Forest Approach (Article, with Maria Rodriguez, Gleneara Bates, & Sebastian Hoyos-Torres)

  • Becoming “New Immigrants” - The Case of Vietnamese Marriage Migrants in Taiwan. (Article)

Teaching

Blog

I maintain a personal blog at Sociological Reasoning. Some of the selected posts can be found below: