Don’t walk into Drew Margolin’s office if you want to have a quick conversation. Frequent visitors to room 401 know what they are signing up for when sitting down on his plush green sofa.
Goldilocks would approve of his office. While it’s not too big nor too small- it feels just right. The walls are white and painted with a special coat, making them a giant dry erase board. Much of which are filled with sparse scribbles and diagrams that are at times, difficult to separate from his 6 year old son Lionel's drawings.
Tall and lengthy, his large hands make light work of typing. Wearing jeans and a casual button up, Drew hunches over his keyboard looking back and forth between his two monitors. An occasional squint and muttered “Ahhh ok” escapes him as he peruses through emails.
Drew Margolin works with data, a lot of data. “I think in my most recent study covering the terrorist attacks in Paris we started with somewhere around 18 million tweets,” he explains when asked exactly how much. “Usually I collaborate with computer scientists who help me make sense of it all.”
He loves data. It’s his thing. And his colleagues know it.
“He’s a human computer,” said fellow professor Christopher Byrne when describing his knowledge. “He can recite every NCAA national champion in basketball all the way back to the sixties.”
When given a pop quiz, Drew didn’t back down. “Who won the 2001 NCAA championship?” I asked, hoping to catch him off guard. Looking up and to the left, “ Uhhhh, I'm pretty sure it was Duke over Arizona.” A quick Google search proved him to be right.
But what does all of this data do for him? For Margolin, it is the medium in which we can understand the collective influence of information on behavior. “I can’t ask you to come into a laboratory with your entire family to resolve some issue, and expect to get reliable results. But with social media I can look at millions of tweets to see and understand certain influences.”
For him, all of this work is accumulating to some sort of intervention with society. What exactly the intervention is going to be is the goal of his empiricist research. “I don't know what I want to tell people to do yet but it is what my work is ultimately working towards.”
If you’ve ever sat in on one of his lectures, you may disagree with the phrase “human computer”, and rightfully so. Margolin is very lively. His lectures are interactive and thought provoking; most of his conversations are engaging. He’s loud at times, claps his hands when making a good point (or hearing one) and periodically moves his hands as if conducting a symphony of violins.
C:“You take something that can easily be boring and make it thought provoking and interactive.”
D:”Yes! That is what I’m trying to do, I’m glad you noticed that.”
C: “So how do you separate Drew Margolin, the motivating engaging professor with a big personality and your, albeit, mundane and tedious data work that makes you known as a human computer?”
His response was slow and prefaced with “Great question” and “No one has ever asked me that” to break up what would have been a thirty second pregnant pause.
“I would say, um, boy I really don’t have a good answer.”
I could tell he wasn’t expecting this and, more importantly, that I was getting somewhere.
What followed was raw, honest, and nothing short of motivational. Students see the energetic professor in his natural habitat. Little curation goes into his memorable lectures. At his core, he rejects taking things at a “soft face value” and desires digging deeper until he is certain he knows that he’s got it right.
“If you really believe that you need to observe real behavior to get reliable information as I said, and that just so happens to be in the form of large amounts of data, then it’s pretty clear that I should understand the data to ultimately understand behavior.”
In his pursuit to understanding behaviors, Margolin found data. His first experience with using it began when he was a management consultant out of college. His colleagues were all engineers, whilst he earned a degree in Economics from Yale and knew nothing about data. “I was terrible,” he humbly admitted.
“As a philosophy I believe that you can learn something that you don't think you can learn if you literally force it...sometimes it comes down to desire.”
He recalled his lackluster career as a basketball player when comparing learning to weight lifting. “I was never particularly good at it, but I knew that it was necessary if I ever wanted to compete on the court.”
Margolin cares about getting things done. His cadence picked up as he began rattling off his dissatisfaction with how the communication field viewed big data. This was no longer the Human Computer; this was Drew Margolin.
“I do feel that in the field of communication there is some ambivalences about big data, some of which I respect and believe are well informed … As a scientist I believe the intangibles are measureable somewhere.”
But have you looked at data as closely as Drew Margolin? The irony of seeing a man cringe when discussing the very thing he’s most known for is palpable.
When you dig deeper, this is an underdog story. The skinny guy on the court, the Econ major competing with engineers, a leading researcher.
Drew Margolin