About

Joshua Braun is a faculty member at the Department of Journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, affiliated with the Computational Social Science Institute. His research focuses on understanding how infrastructures for media distribution are constructed and maintained from a sociological perspective. Braun employs conceptual tools from the history and sociology of socio-technical systems, as well as lenses from media studies, media sociology, journalism studies, and communication theory, to analyze how companies and individuals develop and deploy new systems for distributing content online. From a methods standpoint, Braun typically uses scripting to support qualitative research, enabling him to acquire and analyze data sets in pursuit of interesting cases. He also conducts interviews with software developers and system administrators to gain insights into the infrastructures that support media organizations. His work aims to shed light on the sociotechnical processes underlying media distribution systems.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Physical medicine and rehabilitation
• Cardiology
• Endocrinology

Selected publications

• Journalism, Media Research, and Mastodon: Notes on the Future

  Digital Journalism · 2023-05-10 · 10 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Normal Accidents in the Digital Age

  2023-01-25 · 5 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In the early 1980s, sociologist Charles Perrow set out to understand what went wrong at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant when it experienced a partial meltdown resulting in one of the worst nuclear accidents in history. A presidential commission and a host of other experts had previously reviewed the disaster, each setting out to identify mistakes and assign blame. Perrow arrived at a much more provocative and, to many, troubling thesis, which was that disasters are simply an expected feature of some kinds of societal enterprises, or “systems.” They are, he said, “normal accidents.” Contemporary digital advertising platforms share many of the features Perrow identified as hallmarks of systems destined for normal accidents. But where a normal accident at a nuclear plant might lead to a horrifying explosion, in digital advertising they present in smaller ways—problematic ad placements or fraudulent ad impressions—that nonetheless compound into serious societal problems. Because of the tremendous scale of digital advertising, in which billions of ad impressions are sold each hour, these seemingly small errors collectively result in tens of millions of dollars in revenues taken in by sites hawking disinformation and hate speech, as well as billions of dollars lost to fraud. This essay looks at digital advertising through the lens of normal accident theory, including some of the hard questions it poses about whether some types of systems are unfixable and might best be abandoned.

  PublisherDOI

• ShellLogger: Keeping Track of Python's Interactions with the Shell.

  2022-05-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract not provided.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 1. Points of Origin: Asking Questions in Distribution Research

  New York University Press eBooks · 2021-09-07 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Logger: A Tool for Keeping Track of Python's Interactions with the Shell.

  2021-05-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract not provided.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• CI Tools as Lego Blocks: Build Your Ideal Custom Solution.

  2021-02-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Continuous integration (CI) - the ability to test and merge changes into the main development branch multiple times per day - is growing in importance in the computational science and engineering (CSE) arena. The number of available CI tools continues to grow, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. Many services try to be a one stop shop, e.g., "Is your code on GitHub? Just use GitHub Actions." Unfortunately the complexities of the CSE environment often mean an off-the-shelf tool isn't a 100% solution. Rather than despairing, teams should feel empowered to treat these CI tools as Lego blocks that can be connected together in whatever ways you like to build the CI solution that works best for you. Make use of the strengths of particular CI tools, where appropriate, and avoid their weaknesses, if possible. In this talk, we'll walk you through how we did that for one team using Jenkins, OpenStack, and GitLab CI/CD.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Studies of systematic uncertainty effects on IceCube's real-time angular uncertainty

  Proceedings of 37th International Cosmic Ray Conference — PoS(ICRC2021) · 2021-07-05 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Sources of astrophysical neutrinos can potentially be discovered through the detection of neutrinos in coincidence with electromagnetic or gravitational waves. Real-time alerts generated by IceCube play an important role in this search, acting as triggers for follow-up observations with instruments sensitive to other wavelengths. Once a high-energy event is detected by the IceCube real-time program, a complex and time consuming direction reconstruction method is run in order to calculate an accurate localisation. To investigate the effect of systematic uncertainties on the uncertainty estimate of the location, we simulate a set of high-energy events with a wide range of directions for different ice model realisations, the dominant systematic error in our localization uncertainty. This makes use of a novel simulation tool, which allows the treatment of systematic uncertainties with multiple continuously varied nuisance parameters. These events will be reconstructed using various reconstruction methods. This study will enable us to include systematic uncertainties in a robust manner in the real-time direction and error estimates.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sleeping Giants and indirect boycotts against the far right in United States of America

  Aurora Revista de Arte Mídia e Política · 2021-06-06 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  During the first semester of 2020, in the midst of the pandemic from the new coronavirus, NEAMP PUC-SP (Center for Studies in Art, Media and Politics) began to investigate civil actions around the networks that aims to combat disinformation and hate speech as like: Global Disinformation Index, ISD Global (Institute for Strategic Dialogue), Stop Hate for Profit and Sleeping Giants. Through the analysis of our research around the actions in countries as United States, France, Australia, Sweden, Italy, Finland, England and Holland, we observed that Sleeping Giants Brazil (SGB) starts to emerge following in the steps of the Sleeping Giants from United States; two civilian’s actions that had successful in demonetizing the platforms of disinformation and hate speech by programmatic advertising. However, the theme called for a theoretical basis for analyze these actions, which was found in the paper from Emily West, John D. Coakley and Joshua A. Braun named: Activism, Advertising, and Far-Right Media: The Case of Sleeping Giants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• LoadEnv: Consistently Loading Supported Environments Across Machines.

  2021-05-01

  articleOpen access

  Abstract not provided.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Misinformation-spewing cable companies come under scrutiny

  2021-02-25

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Alexander V. Ng

  Marquette University

  93 shared

• Julie Doyle

  Northern California Institute for Research and Education

  68 shared

• Ian R. Lanza

  Mayo Clinic in Arizona

  51 shared

• Michael W. Weiner

  University of California, San Francisco

  48 shared

• Robert G. Miller

  Loughborough University

  43 shared

• Giorgos K. Sakkas

  University of Thessaly

  43 shared

• Kirsten L. Johansen

  University of Minnesota

  42 shared

• H. T. Dao

  40 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Communication

  Cornell University

  2011

• M.S., Communication

  Cornell University

  2009

• Master of Bioethics, Bioethics

  University of Pennsylvania

  2005

• B.S., Individual Studies Program

  University of California Santa Barbara

  2003