Stuart Shulman

Stuard W. Shulman holds a PhD in American politics. He is an Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Dr. Shulman is the founder and CEO of Texifter, a small business that has had numerous U.S. federal agencies, corporations, and universities as clients. It delivers software capabilities via a graphical user interface as a free service to academics who have published hundreds of mixed methods studies. Texifter had a seven-year commercial operation (2011-2017) supporting access to Twitter data. The business has supported the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sorting tens of millions of public comments since 2007.

Dr. Shulman founded and ran the Qualitative Data AnalysisProgram (QDAP) in the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) at the University of Pittsburgh in 2005. The lab moved to UMass Amherst (2008-2012) and operated out of a space provided by Computer Science. The QDAP labs contributed to the development of computational social science.

In 2005 and 2007, the U.S. State Department sent Dr. Shulman to Kazakhstan to lecture on the merits of democracy in an authoritarian state. In 2009, he served on a Steering Committee for the National Academies of Science and U.S. Secret Service (USSS) “Investigating the Relationship Between Threatening Communications and Actual Behavior.” Based on studies of the 2019 Canadian election, in February 2020, Dr. Shulman gave a solo briefing to 62 members of the US and UK intelligence community, including staff from the Joint Strategic Operations Command and the Joint Chiefs, on “Hunting Bots and Trolls in a Game Environment.” In September 2023, he briefed five senior DHS academic funding personnel about “The Return of the Digital Soldiers” seeking to overturn American democracy via Twitter using a blend of white nationalism and related foreign produced “fake” news.