Charles Chang

Charles Chang is a computational social scientist specializing in large-scale spatial data, with a particular focus on smartphone-based social media. His research leverages big data to advance scientific measurement and causal identification across the social sciences and humanities. He works with diverse data sources, including geospatial, textual, network, and visual data, to study how information circulates in complex political and social environments.

His first book project, Technologies Affecting Information Exchange in Contemporary China: Green Leap Forward?, examines how the physical and spatial characteristics of cities shape political communication. Challenging conventional views of authoritarian information control, the project shows how urban environments mediate and condition information flows in ways that are not fully determined by centralized state power.