Stuart Geiger

Geiger studies the relationships between science, technology, and society — not only how science and technology have substantial impacts on society, but also how they are social institutions in themselves. Much of his work focuses on machine learning, particularly in how user generated platforms like Twitter and Wikipedia are moderated. He has examined how values and biases are embedded in these technologies and how communities make decisions about how to use or not use them. He is a methodological pluralist and specializes in mixed methods, such as combining the rich and thick descriptions of cultural context that come from qualitative methods with large-scale quantitative and computational methods from Natural Language Processing. Geiger also studies the development of data science itself as an academic and professional field.

Geiger earned his Ph.D in 2015 at the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Center for New Media, then was the staff ethnographer at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science. He joined UCSD in 2020, jointly appointed as faculty in the Department of Communication. Geiger collaborates across many different disciplines and ways of knowing, but his work is often grounded in the fields of communication & media studies, science & technology studies, cultural anthropology, organizational sociology, human-computer interaction, and history and philosophy of science.