Brooke Foucault Welles, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Professor Welles focuses on how social networks shape and constrain human behavior.
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Biography
Brooke Foucault Welles is an Associate Professor in the department of Communication Studies and core faculty of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. Combining the methods of network science with theories from the social sciences, Foucault Welles studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks facilitate the pursuit of individual, team, and collective goals. Much of her work is interdisciplinary and collaborative, with co-authors from computer science, political science, digital humanities, design, and public health. Her recent contributions include a series of studies of the transformative power of networked counterpublics, techniques for the longitudinal analysis of communication networks using event-based network analysis, and guidelines for the effective use of network visualizations in scientific and lay publications. Her work is funded by grants from the US Army Research Office and US Army Research Lab, and has been featured in leading social science journals such as the Journal of Communication, Information, Communication and Society, and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She serves on the editorial board of the journal Web Science and was part of the team that developed the Network Literacy Essential Concepts and Core Ideas.
Dr. Foucault Welles received the Northeastern University Excellence in Teaching award in 2017. She teaches classes in social science research methods, children and media, and social network analysis. Dr. Foucault Welles holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Northwestern University. .
Areas of Expertise (3)
Children and Media
Social and Community Services
Social Networks and Human Behavior
Education (3)
Northwestern University: Ph.D., Communication 2012
Cornell University: M.S., Communication 2003
Cornell University: B.S., Communication 2001
Links (2)
Media Appearances (5)
What makes a hashtag like #metoo or #myNYPD go viral?
News @ Northeastern
2018-05-09
Two Northeastern professors, Brooke Foucault Welles, a computational social scientist, and Sarah Jackson, a scholar of social movements, were watching this play out on Twitter in real time. They knew they had stumbled upon something interesting. Together, they decided to investigate how the hashtag was spreading. Jackson and Welles created a network from a sample of 13,631 tweets that included #MyNYPD. They assumed the network would show that popular accounts with large followings—such as mainstream media outlets and celebrities—were responsible for making the hashtag go viral. But instead, they found something unexpected. “We saw a bunch of people we’d never heard of before—local community organizers, online activism accounts with few followers,” Welles said. In other words, not established social influencers with clout, but regular people with a story they wanted to share. And these people were largely women and people of color...
Politics in the Age of Twitter
Maine Public
2018-01-15
Where once pamphlets were a way for politicians to distribute their ideas, attack political enemies, and reach an audience, today we have Twitter. We’ll discuss the role of Twitter in current day politics and how it is changing political discourse and impacting social movements...
Social media spotlight: Brooke Foucault Welles
News @ Northeastern
2017-04-05
Brooke Foucault Welles’ Twitter use is deeply tied to her research. Welles, assistant professor of communication studies, examines how social networks shape and constrain human behavior. One area of particular focus is social media activism and online activism networks...
These divided states: The media's role in today's fragmented society
News @ Northeastern
2017-04-03
“I do see folks looking at data, and including snippets of data to support stories, but I worry about the over-reliance on data without explaining what they are,” said Brooke Foucault Welles, assistant professor of communication studies, adding that it’s vital for journalists to cast as critical an eye at the source and collection method of data as they would at any other source of information...
3Qs: Trapped in social media 'echo chambers'
News @ Northeastern
2016-07-06
Here, Brooke Foucault Welles, assistant professor of communication studies in the College of Arts, Media and Design and an expert in social networks, discusses this trend and its impact on debate in the public realm...
Research Focus (1)
Women and resilience in moments of social crisis
A feminist perspective
This project explores networks of women strengthening community resilience as they respond to a diversity of different kinds of social crises. Through an interdisciplinary cross-scalar collaboration, the research team will focus on understanding the how women’s networks respond to disruptions.
Articles (5)
Network visualization and problem-solving support: A cognitive fit study
Social Networks
Brooke Foucault Welles, Weiai Xu
2018 This study examines the relative effectiveness of four different social network representations for improving human problem-solving accuracy and speed: node-link diagrams, adjacency matrices, tables, and text. Results suggest that visual network representations improve problem-solving accuracy and speed, compared with text. Among the visual representations, tables produced superior problem-solving outcomes for symbolic tasks and link-node diagrams produced superior problem-solving outcomes for spatial tasks. These results partially support a cognitive fit model of problem-solving support. There is not “one best way” to represent network data. Instead, it is important to match network representations and problem-solving tasks.
#GirlsLikeUs: Trans advocacy and community building online
SAGE Journals
Jackson, S.J., Bailey, M., and Foucault Welles, B.
2017 In this research, we examine the advocacy and community building of transgender women on Twitter through methods of network and discourse analysis and the theory of networked counterpublics. By highlighting the network structure and discursive meaning making of the #GirlsLikeUs network, we argue that the digital labor of trans women, especially trans women of color, represents the vanguard of struggles over self-definition. We find that trans women on Twitter, led by Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, and in response to histories of misrepresentation and ongoing marginalization and violence, deliberately curate an intersectional networked counterpublic that works to legitimize and support trans identities and advocate for trans autonomy in larger publics and counterpublics.
#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks
Information, Communication & Society
Sarah J. Jackson & Brooke Foucault Welles
2016 On the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown’s body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice.
Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics
Journal of Communication
Sarah J. Jackson & Brooke Foucault Welles
2015 In this article we investigate the hijacking of the Twitter hashtag #myNYPD following the launch of a public relations campaign by the New York City Police Department in April of 2014. Theorizing networked counterpublics, we examine how Twitter was used as a platform to generate and promote counterpublic narratives about racial profiling and police misconduct. Through a combination of large-scale network analysis and qualitative discourse analysis, we detail counterpublic structure and leadership, discursive strategies deployed by crowdsourced elites, and the reception of counterpublic activism in mainstream media. We conclude with implications for understanding the evolving nature of counterpublics, with particular consideration to the roles of new and old media in (re)shaping public debates around marginalization, profiling, and policing.
Individual Motivations and Network Effects: A Multilevel Analysis of the Structure of Online Social Relationships
ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Foucault Welles, B. and Contractor, N.
2015 This article explores the relative influence of individual and network-level effects on the emergence of online social relationships. Using network modeling and data drawn from logs of social behavior inside the virtual world Second Life, we combine individual- and network-level theories into an integrated model of online social relationship formation.
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