Dr. Travis G. Coan is a Professor in Computational Social Science at the University of Exeter. He is co-director of the Centre for Climate Communication and Data Science (C3DS), previously directed the Centre for Computational Social Science (C2S2), and is a member of the Centre for Elections, Media, and Participation (CEMaP). While Dr. Coan has published on a wide-range of topics, his core research examines questions in the areas of environmental and political communication. Travis' methodological interests include Bayesian statistics, natural language processing, and computer vision. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Climatic Change, Global Environmental Change, Electoral Studies, International Studies Quarterly, and Social Networks, among others.
Travis' recent funded projects include
- Principle investigator. "Intelligent Content Categorisation for the Scaling and Automation of Scientific Integrity Checks", Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), £29,000, 2005-2006.
- Co-investigator. “British Voices: new methods for understanding the impact of social change on individual lives” [with Jane Elliot], Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), £279,000, 2024 – 2025.
- Co-investigator. “Extreme Identities: A Linguistic and Visual Analysis of European Far-Right Online Communities’ Politics of Identity (ExId)” [with Stephane Baele, Nicole Doerr (U. Copenhagen), and Constantine Boussalis (Trinity College Dublin)]. New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe (NORFACE), €1,086,570, 2020-2023.
- Co-investigator. “Mining the Chans: Exposing the Visual and Linguistic Dynamics of Radicalization in Far-right Image-boards (MineChans) [with Stephane Baele and Lewys Brace]. Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats CREST, £69,000, 2020.
Research supervision:
Travis supervises students on the intersection between climate change communication and computational methods. He is particularly interested in supervising projects that employ natural language processing and other computational methods to study climate information integrity (broadly defined).
Current students:
Ranadheer Malla (Advanced Quantitative Methods)
Mirjam Odile Nanko (Advanced Quantiative Methods)
Past students:
Dr. Raluca Popp
Dr. Hannah Bunting
Dr. Ned Westwood
