Summary
This project seeks to increase public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine. By harnessing the power of data science and artificial intelligence, it will develop evidence-based public messaging that encourages vaccination, in partnership with local public health departments.
Over the past two decades, an increasing proportion of the population has come to view vaccines with skepticism, and in many cases, refrained from getting vaccinated altogether. While the procedural, behavioral and access barriers to vaccine uptake have been studied extensively, the emotional, ideological and rhetorical bases for vaccine hesitancy are poorly understood. This limited understanding, combined with public distrust in science and government, is likely to undermine efforts to robustly and quickly vaccinate against COVID-19.
The project will engage literary scholars, medical professionals, data scientists, political scientists, community leaders and public health officials. It will create the world’s largest public dataset of vaccine-hesitant language in English, collected from online forums such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, which have become primary platforms for discussing and disseminating vaccine skepticism and other vaccine-related concerns. Leveraging the power of such collected data, the project will use artificial intelligence to develop public messaging that reflects the ways in which people express specific forms of hesitancy. This approach represents a significant effort to use AI to analyze the language of vaccine hesitancy and then use that language to combat vaccine skepticism.
In Partnership With:
- The State of Maine
- Ulster County, State of New York
- The Vaccine Confidence Project
Team
Project Team
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Noémie Elhadad
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altDr. Noémie Elhadad is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, affiliated with Computer Science and the Data Science Institute at Columbia University.
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Rishi K. Goyal
Columbia UniversityProject LeadRead Full Bio arrow_right_altRishi Goyal is Director, Medical Humanities Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center (in Medical Humanities and Ethics and the Institute for...
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Arden Hegele
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altArden Hegele, PhD, is a Medical Humanities Fellow and literary scholar at Columbia University. She teaches on the Morningside campus in the Department of English and Comparative Literature...
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Kathleen R. McKeown
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altKathleen R. McKeown is the Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and the Founding Director of the Data Science Institute, serving as Director...
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Moacir P. de Sa Pereira
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altMoacir P. de Sá Pereira (he/him/his) is the Research Data Librarian at Columbia University Libraries. A scholar of literature and space, he taught at New York University, Vilnius Gediminas...
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Melissa Stockwell
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altDr. Stockwell is Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Health and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics (Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons) and Population and Family Health...
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Prerna Singh
Brown UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altPrerna Singh is Mahatma Gandhi Associate Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Brown University with appointments in the Department of Behavioral and Social...
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Dennis Yi Tenen
Columbia UniversityProject LeadRead Full Bio arrow_right_altDennis Yi Tenen is an associate professor of English Literature, Digital Humanities, and New Media Studies at Columbia University. A long-time affiliate of Columbia’s Data Science Institute...
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Jeremiah Trinidad-Christensen
Columbia UniversityProject TeamRead Full Bio arrow_right_altJeremiah Trinidad-Christensen (he/him/his) is the Head of the Research Data Services at Columbia University Libraries. Prior to this he was the GIS Librarian, where he was hired to create...
Go Deeper
Publications
Rishi Goyal, Arden Hegele, and Dennis Tenen. May 22, 2021.: Op-Ed: How 'my body, my choice' came to define the vaccine skepticism movement. Los Angeles Times.