I am a sociologist with a background in computer science. In my research, I generally employ quantitative, computational, and often experimental methods on phenomena of (my) interest, ranging from questions on where and why ethnic violence occurs to election behaviour within online communities like Wikipedia. I am particularly interested in understanding how individuals are shaped by their social contexts and networks ties.
If you do not have access to any of my papers but would like to read them, please send me an email: nicole.schwitter[at]uni-mannheim.de.
(2024) How offline meetings affect online activities: the case of Wikipedia. EPJ Data Science, 13(67).
(2024) Offline connections, online votes: The role of offline ties in an online public election. New Media & Society.
(2024; published online 2023) Using Natural Experiments to Uncover Effects of Anti-Refugee Riots on Attitudes of Refugees. Sociology, 8(1): 253–262. With Ulf Liebe.
(2024) Alters-, Perioden- und Kohorteneffekte in Stimmung und Schwerpunkt literarischer Werke. Abschlussbericht, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
(2023) Bridging the offline and online: 20 years of offline meeting data of the German-language Wikipedia. Journal of Computational Social Science.
(2023) Not Cologne but the data collection (might have) changed everything: a cautionary tale on ignoring changes in data recording in sociological research, 39(6): 1005-1010. European Sociological Review. With Ulf Liebe.
(2022) Big data and development sociology: An overview and application on governance and accountability through digitalization in Tanzania. Frontiers in Sociology. With Alexia Pretari, William Marwa, Simone Lombardini and Ulf Liebe.
(2022) Individuals of high socioeconomic status are altruistic in sharing money but egoistic in sharing time. Scientific reports, 12: 10831. With Ulf Liebe and Andreas Tutić.
(2022) Does living in districts with higher levels of ethnic violence affect refugees’ attitudes towards the host country? Empirical evidence from Germany. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 45(15): 2793-2821. With Ulf Liebe.
(2022; published online 2020) Social capital in retirement villages: A literature review. Ageing&Society, 42(7): 1560-1588.
(2021) Explaining Ethnic Violence: On the Relevance of Geographic, Social, Economic, and Political Factors in Hate Crimes on Refugees. European Sociological Review, 37(3): 429-448. With Ulf Liebe.
(2020) Going Digital: Web data collection using Twitter as an example Oxfam Going Digital Series. With Ulf Liebe.
(2019) Twitter Data Analysis. In A. Pretari, Active Citizenship in Tanzania: Impact Evaluation of the ‘Governance and Accountability through Digitalization’ project. Impact Evaluation Report 2017-2019: Chapters 3.4 and 4.3. Oxford: Oxfam GB. With Ulf Liebe.
(2019) Objective Status, Subjective Status and Prosociality of Swiss Apprentices. Swiss Journal of Sociology, 45(1): 57-81. With Ulf Liebe and Andreas Tutić.
(2024) Disability discrimination in hiring: A systematic review. SocArXiv. With Stella Chatzitheochari and Ulf Liebe.
My PhD thesis investigates the role of offline ties in online communities, taking the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as an example. It uses publicly available data collected from the German Wikipedia to assess whether offline meeting participation affects editors' behaviour in three different domains: 1) productivity and collaboration, 2) norm-relevant behaviour, and 3) election participation. Data was collected on over 4000 meetings covering the period between the creation of the German Wikipedia in 2001 to March 2020. In the first substantive chapter of this thesis, matching meetup attendees with a comparable control group and employing a difference-in-differences design, I find positive and significant effects of meetup attendance on productivity on Wikipedia, measured as the number of edits. In the second substantive chapter, I build upon the theoretical arguments put forward by Coleman (1990) and test whether offline network density influences norm-relevant behaviour. I find only limited importance of the offline network: those attending meetups tend to both experience and conduct fewer norm violations, and they give and receive generally more rewards. However, the density of the offline network does not play a noteworthy role in explaining online norm violation and norm enforcement, except that those in high-density offline networks generally give fewer rewards. Lastly, for the third substantive chapter, I collected data on all elections for administrators on the German Wikipedia. Using hybrid multilevel random effects models, I find that offline participation measures influence whether one is successful as a candidate, and whether and how one votes. This highlights important processes in situations of public elections. This study is one of the first to bridge the gap between online and offline behaviour, using digital trace data and offline meeting data on a large scale. The findings emphasise how offline interactions in online communities can affect the community and the important role of social capital. They have implications for online communities and Wikimedia in regard to understanding the importance of meetups and (inequality in) access to meetings.
(2022) The role of offline ties in online communities: the case of Wikipedia. PhD thesis.
Have you ever needed to assign prestige score to ISCO coded job titles? This very straight-forward R package can help you do just that:
R package: ISCO08ConveRsions: Converts ISCO-08 to Job Prestige Scores, ISCO-88 and Job Name.
(2024) Bridging the offline and online - Offline meetings of Wikipedians. Wikimedia Research Showcase: March 2024.
(2020) Podcast: Coronavirus and Web Data Analysis. Real Geek Series. With Simone Lombardini and Alexia Pretari.