Social Networks and Online Communities
Understanding the risks, impacts, motivators, and benefits of online information sharing.
Research Projects
Balancing Personal and Public Regions on Social Media: Exploring What WeChat Moments Tells Us About Temporality
Examining the popular WeChat social app, which does not store users' history on its servers and requires users to manually archive any history, to see if there are lessons to be learned for popular social platforms like Facebook and Google that auto-archive user information, which might not be what some users want.
Designing a Crowdsourced Repository of Local Resources for Individuals who have Chronic Health Conditions
Self-management support is a critical component of effective chronic illness care. Individuals who have chronic health conditions often require intensive support to make sustainable long-term lifestyle changes to improve and maintain their health. While there is strong existing literature on the lifestyle and health decisions of the chronically ill, their information needs are understudied.
New Ways to Fic: How Kpop Fans Are Using Social Media
This study focuses on K-pop fanfiction writers and how social media plays a role in their fan experience. Fanfiction writers are known for adopting new technologies and utilizing them to meet their needs (Versaphile). In the K-pop (Korean pop music) fandom, fanfiction authors have found innovative ways to use social media to enhance their storytelling.
SaTC: CORE: Medium: Collaborative: BaitBuster 2.0: Keeping Users Away From Clickbait
Developing novel techniques - through the application of state-of-the-art machine learning - to detect various forms of clickbait, especially video-based clickbait, and study user behavior on social media to design effective warning systems.
AISL: Innovations in Development: Community-Driven Project That Adapt Technology for Environmental Learning in Nature Preserves
Engaging members of low-income and minority communities in environmental projects that are meaningful to their lives and can promote informal STEM learning. The researchers will look at how these projects impact participants and identify the key factors that influence the development of such community projects.
CRII: CHS: Facilitating Information Exchange in Crowd Problem Solving Discussions
Online communities, from question and answer sites to general-purpose discussion forums, are increasingly working to solve hard problems together, often through a process of open sharing and discussion of ideas and information.
Performing Play: Cultural Production on Twitch.tv
Every day, millions of people log on to the website Twitch.tv and watch others play games, a practice known as streaming. Briefly, a stream features live gameplay overlaid with a camera to capture the performer’s reactions, and a chat channel for the audience, facilitating social interaction relating to the stream’s content.
Studying User Perceptions and Experiences with Algorithms ICWSM Half-Day Workshop Proposal
From Facebook’s News Feed algorithm that shapes the posts and updates we see, to Spotify’s recommendation service that introduces us to new music that we might love, to dating site algorithms that attempt to match us with potential romantic partners, algorithms play an increasingly important role in shaping many aspects of our daily lives.
Amplifying the International Research Network for Assessing the Value and Impact of Digitized Ethnographic Archives
Creating a workshop connect scholars and archivists pursuing ethnographic impact research, identify and plan collaborative research projects and funding opportunities, and develop a website to showcase collaborative projects, project participants, and resource sharing.
"There's a creepy guy on the other end at Google!": Engaging middle school students in a drawing activity to elicit their mental models of Google
Tackling youth digital literacy education through an innovative art exercise, revealing a pervasive lack of understanding of Google and search engines by youth.
Crowdsourcing community resources to help individuals manage chronic health conditions
Individuals with chronic health conditions often do not translate knowledge of appropriate health behaviors to manage their condition into active lifestyle changes.
Towards Identifying Values and Tensions in Designing a Historically-Sensitive Data Platform: A Case of Urban Renewal Documents
Bringing to light an unseen collection of urban home renewal documents and digitally curating them in an effort to better understand the displacement of minority communities due to modern renovation.
The Role of Emotions in Sociopolitical Polish and Lithuanian Social Media
This project, run through ARLIS, investigates how emotion impacts information propagation and sharing in Polish and Lithuanian social media. Teams of in-country annotators independently assess each post, including all multimedia content, for over 22 distinct emotions inclusively on 0 to 100 scales--meaning that the same post will have different scores for different emotions. We will conduct multi-level statistical analyses of the impact of emotions, specific topics, and account and message features on social media sharing and engagement.
Faculty
