Laurie Lawson

Laurie Lawson is a PhD candidate in Information Science. She has a BS in Computer Science and a minor in Arabic from Washington and Lee University in Virginia. Now under Brian Keegan in Information Science and Alexandra Siegel in Political Science, she has received her masters degree from the Information Science department and investigates Collective Memory, Computational Social Science, Digital Trace Data, Cross-language Analysis, NLP and Network Analysis. 

She was granted the Wikimedia Foundation Grant for the 2023-2024 school year and complete the project titled, “Network Perspectives on collective memory processes across the Arabic and English Wikipedias” (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_Fund/Network_perspectives_on_collective_memory_processes_across_the_Arabic_and_English_Wikipedias). This resulted in a research article with a proposed methods toolkit for language- agnostic collective memory analysis that is currently under review (https://arxiv.org/html/2404.10706v1). 

Her dissertation is titled: Cross-Language Echoes of Digital Collective Memory Surrounding the Arab Spring and focuses on collective memory expression on Wikipedia and constructed with contemporary LLMs.