News reports of firearm violence focus on access to guns, gang activity, poverty, and racial segregation. A careful reading of the conversations on social media among youth living in marginalized communities with high rates of violence, however, can provide an alternate yet in-depth narrative of how and why violence occurs. Beyond the Bullets proposes a hybrid approach to addressing gun violence, mixing automated, machine learning analyses of the networks implicit in social media posts, with community-level expertise and social work knowledge of community development. Beyond the Bullets is led by Desmond Upton Patton from Columbia’s School of Social Work and Kathleen McKeown from the Computer Science Department.
Beyond the Bullets2017-2018
