Eleveny Chen

Eleveny (Shiyi) Chen

PhD Student in Communication · University of California, Davis

I'm a PhD student in Communication at UC Davis, advised by Prof. Seth Frey in the Computational Communication (C²) Lab. Broadly, I'm a data scientist interested in how communication shapes what people believe about politics — not just what positions they hold, but how those positions come to hang together as recognizable ideologies.

My dissertation uses computational text analysis to study how beliefs become political through communicative processes like deliberation, media exposure, and elite cue-giving. My other work spans polarization and political reasoning, public opinion dynamics, institutional change in online communities, social movement discourse, and computational methodology for social science.

I like building things — I'm a programmer at heart, and I enjoy developing computational tools and infrastructure as much as using them.

syechen@ucdavis.edu GitHub

Research

Under Review / Revise & Resubmit
Accrete and reform: Dual mechanisms of institutional change in online communities
Shiyi (Eleveny) Chen, Namrata Kasaraneni, Charles Kiene, Benjamin Mako Hill, & Seth Frey
R&R at Social Media + Society
Working Papers
Shooting friends and missing enemies: Decomposing polarized policy preferences as signal detection problems
Eleveny (Shiyi) Chen, Harry Yan, Daniel (D.J.) Flynn, & Seth Frey
Working paper
Mapping construct operationalization practices: An LLM-based extraction approach to detecting jingle-jangle fallacies in social science
Eleveny (Shiyi) Chen, Skylar (Chenyi) Ding, Ziyu (Sophie) Zhao, Miner Ye, & Seth Frey
Working paper
Why here and not there? A pragmatic account of selective errors in LLM-based construct extraction
Skylar (Chenyi) Ding, Eleveny (Shiyi) Chen, Ziyu (Sophie) Zhao, Miner Ye, & Seth Frey
Working paper
Understanding opposition to Taiwan's #MeToo movement: A system justification analysis of countermovement discourse
Qingyue Xu & Eleveny (Shiyi) Chen
Working paper

Projects

Testing Theories with LLMs
LLM-based extraction approach to mapping construct operationalization practices and detecting jingle-jangle fallacies in social science.
Data & Code ↗
Signal Detection Theory
Decomposing polarized policy preferences as signal detection problems — separating sensitivity from bias in political judgment.
Data & Code ↗
Community Rule Change
Dual mechanisms of institutional change in online communities — accretion and reform in community governance.
Data & Code ↗
More coming soon
Additional research projects and tools will be shared here as they develop.
GitHub ↗

Presentations

2026

Teaching

Graduate Teaching Assistant, UC Davis

CMN 152V — Social Science with Online Data Summer '25, Winter '26
CMN 120 — Interpersonal Communication Spring '26
CMN 001 — Introduction to Public Speaking Fall '24, Winter '25, Spring '25, Fall '25
CMN 003V — Interpersonal Communication Competence Summer '24

Skills & Tools

Education

Ph.D., Communication — UC Davis 2023–2028 (expected)
B.A., Communication — University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 2023

Minors: Computer Science, Political Science, Quantitative Methods in Social Science