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Laura Kurek

Ph.D. Candidate
University of Michigan
lkurek (at) umich.edu


About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate advised by Ceren Budak and Eric Gilbert at the University of Michigan in the School of Information. I research information manipulation on the internet using both quantitative and qualitative methods. I work with data from social media platforms (X/Twitter, Rumble, Telegram) as well as peer-production knowledge sites (Wikipedia).

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I worked in industry for several years as a data science specialist at Accenture Federal Services. In 2017, I spent a year in the Ural Mountains on a Fulbright Scholarship.

Research interests: Social computing, computational social science

Education

Publications

  1. Wikipedia in Wartime: Experiences of Wikipedians Maintaining Articles About the Russia-Ukraine War
    Laura Kurek, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2025)
    PDF

  2. Outsourcing an Information Operation: A Complete Dataset of Tenet Media's Podcasts on Rumble
    Laura Kurek, Eric Gilbert, Ceren Budak
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.19802
    PDF

  3. Seeing Like an AI: How LLMs Apply (and Misapply) Wikipedia Neutrality Norms
    Joshua Ashkinaze, Ruijia Guan, Laura Kurek, Eytan Adar, Ceren Budak, Eric Gilbert
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.04183
    PDF

Other writings:

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