Tobacco Networks

Stephan Risi, DH Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow

How do you sift through several decades-worth of documents from the Tobacco industry to paint a cohesive picture of how its major players have deceived and misled the public about the dangers of smoking?

Led by MIT postdoctoral associate Stephan Risi, the Tobacco Networks project’s goal was to produce a general network visualization of roughly 1.4 million documents of data related to Tobacco researchers, lawyers, and marketing experts in a way that visually elucidates the connections between significant people and corporations in the industry. The anticipated scope of the Tobacco Networks project is to provide a resource for those studying the strategies employed by tobacco companies throughout history to persuade consumers and mask the addictive effects of the drug.

Vintage Chesterfield cigarette advertisement reading:

Student Team

  • Kidist Adamu

  • Ife Ademolu-Odeneye

  • Melissa Calvert

  • Angelica Castillejos

  • Stephan Ducrepin

  • Crista Falk

  • Benjamin Gao

  • Raquel Garcia

  • Montserrat Garza

  • Michelle He

  • Meesue Kim

  • Amy Lei

  • Felix Li

  • Jason Lin

  • Ivy Mao

  • Sage Maxwell

  • Catherine Mei

  • Sergio Perez

  • Parul Singh

  • Mayowa Songonuga

  • Justice Vidal

  • Christina Wang

  • Dylan Weber

  • Jordan Wilke

  • Jessica Wu

  • Angel Yang

  • Funing Yang

  • Samantha York

  • Sirena Yu

  • Katherine Zeng

  • Ophelia Zhu

  • Peter Choza

  • Ankita Devasia

  • Jawad Yousef

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SHASS Affiliated Projects