Nga Than
Senior Data Scientist, Prudential Financial
Doctoral Candidate, CUNY - The Graduate Center

Nga Than is a Senior Data Scientist at Prudential Financial, and a doctoral candidate in the Sociology program at City University of New York – The Graduate Center. She was a Mellon digital publics fellow at the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center 2020-2022, and a research affiliate at University of Buffalo 2020-2021. Her writings on Sociology & AI appear frequently at Montreal AI Ethics Institute, e27, The Gradient, VNExpress. 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 natural language processing to analyze large corpora of text 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]     [Resume]     [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?

  • 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

  • 2022. The Privacy Conundrum: An empirical examination of barriers to privacy among Indian social media users (with Abhishek Gupta, Ameen Jauhar) [Link]

  • 2021. A Practical Guide for Teaching the Sociological Imagination (with Karen Okigbo, Sebastian Villamar-Santamaria, Anna Zhelnina, and Isabel Gil-Everaert). CUNY Scholarship on Manifold. The Teaching and Learning Center. [Link]

  • 2021. Between Two Crises: Artisanal Food Startup Founders in New York. Metropolitics [Link]

  • 2021. "Welcome to Gab" (with Maria Rodriguez, Friederike Windel, and Diane Yoong). Interdisciplinary Digital Engagement in Arts & Humanities (IDEAH) [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]

Manuscripts in Progress

  • #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)

  • 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: