Alexander C. Nwala

Dr. Alexander C. Nwala is an Assistant Professor of Data Science at William & Mary, where he also directs the News Web and Social Media (NEWS) research lab. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Old Dominion University and was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Observatory on Social Media (OSoMe) at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Research Interests:

• Social media and network analysis
• Computational social science
• Web and data science
• Web archiving
• Local news dynamics
• Natural language processing (NLP)

His research focuses on understanding online behavior, disinformation, and the role of local news on social media. He develops tools to analyze and characterize social media accounts, detect coordination, and preserve digital content.

Recent Publication Trends: His recent work centers on modeling social media account behavior using language frameworks (e.g., BLOC), analyzing manipulation tactics like deletion, and improving web archiving practices through quality assessment of social media seeds. These efforts integrate NLP, data science, and web science to address challenges in digital information integrity and preservation.

Scientific Contributions and Tools:

• BLOC: A language framework for modeling social media account behavior
• agwagram: Tool for studying authentic and inauthentic Twitter behaviors
• Local Memory Project: Service for discovering local media
• Coordiscope: Detects coordination between social media accounts
• StoryGraph: Analyzes news cycle similarity across sources
• Sumgram: Summarizes text collections using conjoined n-grams

Teaching and Mentoring: Dr. Nwala teaches courses such as Ethics in Data Science and Web Science. He advises graduate students including Gangani Ariyarathne, Isuru Ariyarathne, and Ian MacDonald. He has taught students at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels and collaborates across disciplines with computer scientists, journalists, archivists, and legal scholars.

Research Lab: The NEWS Lab at William & Mary investigates the web as an information ecosystem, with a focus on local news and disinformation vectors on social media platforms.