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PhD in Sustainable Development Student Profiles
Website is: www.columbia.edu/~jac2130
Johannes Castner is a fourth year PhD student in Sustainable Development. His general research approach is that of complexity science and in particular, he most frequently draws on methods from Mathematical Sociology. Currently, Johannes is working, with James Rising, on a software tool that uses ideas and methods from Computational Linguistics, to extract causal assertions from large textual transcriptions of political debates (such as the Congressional Record), and arranges them into mathematical structures that represent the politicians' systems of causal beliefs (signed di-graphs). Once this tool is built, Johannes has plans to extract dynamic causal belief systems for each Senator over the entire span of the Congressional Record (from 1873 until today), to construct measures of within party "cognitive diversity", "cognitive dissonance" and "value diversity", which are three dimensions along which a political party might be judged by voters, according to Johannes's theory.
Currently, Johannes is co-instructor of a course on Complexity Science, with Upmanu Lall and James Rising: https://courseworks.columbia.edu/tbook-tool/viewTextbook.vtb?courseId=EAEEE9305_003_2013_1&view=course