Dr Chamil Rathnayake

Personal statement

Chamil Rathnayake's teaching and research take an interdisciplinary approach to understand new media platforms. He is particularly interested in examining the co-existence of transactive and non-transactive utterances in issue-response networks. His current research pays special attention to 'mediated publicness' enabled by social media affordances. Chamil's recent work suggested that new media affordances allow novel socialities, such as instances of 'momentary connectedness', that function as extended domains of connectivity. Chamil is a computational social science enthusiast, and his work applies methods in Social Network Analysis(SNA) and Natural Language Processing, such as centrality analysis, community detection, text mining, clustering, and topic model analysis. Chamil is a winner of the Frances Davis Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Dan Wedemeyer Award for Excellence in Teaching offered by the University of Hawaii. He served as a reviewer for several academic journals, including Convergence, Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society, and the The Social Science Journal.