Yigang Qin was an undergraduate student in Hong Kong studying computer science and Chinese literature when his interests expanded. He soon became fascinated by the field of human-computer interaction, social computing and science and technology studies.
He loved learning the technical knowledge of computer science, but he could not stop thinking about the social implications of information technologies and the positions of people in those technological systems.
Now a first-year Ph.D. student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, Qin is focused on studying the implications of contemporary information technologies on social interactions and organizational dynamics. Specifically, he is focused on social media, data, algorithms, surveillance and robots. Outside of the iSchool, he is also taking method and theory courses in the Sociology department at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.
Qin credits the iSchool and his professors for helping cultivate his love of information science and technology, especially his academic advisor assistant professor EunJeong Cheon, associate professor Ingrid Erickson and professor and associate dean for research Carsten Østerlund.
“I chose Syracuse mostly because my research interests align well with the faculty members at the iSchool who can really hold me up and provide insightful guidance on my study and becoming an independent scholar and a member in academic communities,” he said.
As part of his studies, Qin recently completed a project investigating a gender-related violence debate on Chinese social media about a June 2022 attack that involved a group of men assaulting four women at a barbecue restaurant. Qin’s paper, Dismantling Gender Blindness in Online Discussion of a Crime/Gender Dichotomy, was published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2024).
“In this study, my collaborators and I used machine learning and critical discourse analysis to understand different parties in the debate, how a criminal framing of the underlying incident delegitimizes gender awareness, and how grassroots digital feminists resisted such discourses, based on which we highlighted some hurdles facing Chinese digital feminists launching online activism for social change,” Qin said.
“This project is meaningful to me because it is the first formal research project led by myself and resulted in a publication in one of the top venues in the field of HCI (human-computer interaction),” he added. “Completing this project gave me confidence in research and intuitions about which direction I want to pursue my research in the broad realm of sociotechnical studies that examines technologies as embedded in societies.”
After his planned graduation in 2028, Qin hopes to find a tenure-track position in an R1 doctoral university to continue his research and teaching in the fields of HCI and STS. He also hopes to do research in an industry or non-profit sector. For now, he is focused on earning a Ph.D. and continually improving his time management and organization skills.
“Various responsibilities as a Ph.D. student can be very stressful without strategies and plans,” he said. “I think of college years as the time for students to learn as much as they can and as broad as they can at the same time for them to think about what kind of personalities they have and what types of things most interest them.”