Sean Doody is a sociology doctoral candidate at George Mason University who studies political economy, digital sociology, and science and technology.
His dissertation studies the changing structure of right-wing ideological and cultural production on the internet, specifically focusing on the right’s dominant presence on YouTube.
Key to his dissertation is a careful study of the role that rationality and formal logic play in the framing of far-right political opinions, arguments, and mythologies in the digital realm, as these right-wing actors are careful to represent themselves as somber intellectuals willing to engage in a disinterested objective examination of “the facts,” however uncomfortable or “politically incorrect” they may be.
His research uses a mixture of computational, machine learning, and qualitative methods, including Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and other classification tools.
