Craft, Curiosity, and Knowledge: Duncan Watts in Conversation with Philipp Brandt

Abstract

Duncan Watts’ work has helped define how we study social relations, collective dynamics, and digital platforms. It ranges from articles combining formal modeling and empirical discoveries to widely read books. He has moved between disciplines and problems, shaping the fields of network science and computational social science along the way. In this conversation with Philipp Brandt, he retraces his steps and maps out an integrative framework that flips the research design process to start with problems and produce generalizable knowledge.