Rate My Professor Robert Ackland

Professor Robert Ackland is a Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), where he has been affiliated since 1994. He earned a BComm in Economics with first-class honours from the University of Melbourne, an MA in Economics from Yale University as a Fulbright Scholar, and a PhD in Economics from ANU in 2001, focusing on index number theory and international comparisons of income. Before his academic career at ANU, Ackland served as a senior researcher in the Bureau of Immigration Research within the Commonwealth Department of Immigration from 1991 to 1993. He also worked as a World Bank consultant in Washington DC from 1995 to 1997 on poverty analysis and contributed to projects for AusAID and the Asian Development Bank.

Ackland's research operates at the intersection of empirical social science and computer science, developing methods in information retrieval, data visualization, and social network analysis to investigate networks on the World Wide Web. He established and leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) Lab under a 2005 Australian Research Council (ARC) Special Research Initiative grant and has been chief investigator on five ARC grants. His work addresses online networks, digital trace data ethics, disinformation, and political deliberation. Ackland teaches courses on the social science of the Internet and online research methods in the ANU Master of Social Research, having introduced the Social Science of the Internet specialization in 2008. Key publications include his book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE, 2013); chapters such as Ethics of Research Using Digital Trace Data (2024) and Internet Research Agency Campaigns in the Australian Twittersphere (2020); and articles like Bridging in Network Organisations: The Case of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022) and Which Audiences Engage With Advocacy Groups on Twitter? (2021). His research has garnered over 2,270 citations on Google Scholar. Ackland has held visiting fellowships at the Oxford Internet Institute and the University of Oxford, co-organized symposia on e-Social Science and nanotechnology's social impact, and currently supervises research students while leading projects on generative AI in online politics and countering disinformation.