Research
Latest research from Social Media & Society Cluster members
Vikki Katz investigates how low-income and immigrant families adopt technology
Vikki Katz investigates how parents and children in low-income and immigrant families make decisions about adopting technology and how they use digital devices, the Internet, and social media together and independently for formal and informal learning activities. She’s currently completing a Gates Foundation-funded study on this topic that involved…
Political actors and strategic use of social media
This project examines the behavior of political actors (US Members of Congress) on the microblogging service Twitter. In addition to the structure of political relationships on the platform, the study explores strategic hashtag and language use. Ognyanova has also examined data collected by Politwoops: an international project that tracks politicians on Twitter…
SOcial and CRowdsourced AcTivities Extraction System (SOCRATES)
SOCRATES is a social-computational system and platform for the study of social media using crowdsourcing. It is both a framework and a technical system through which researchers can collect content from one or more social media sources, explore the collected content to help generate hypotheses, and analyze the content…
Superconnected
Mary Chayko’s research explores the impact of the internet, social media and digital technology on individuals, communities, networks and societies. It has contributed to current understandings of the reality of the online experience, the intersection of the online and the offline, and opportunities for and consequences of digital social connectedness…
The Logic of Social Movement Politics: Mapping and Theorizing Social Movement Politics across the Last Thirty Years
The goal of this research is to map and theorize the changing logic of social movement-based resistance in relation to the shifts in the strategy and practice of capitalism as well as the correspondent evolution in information and communication technologies. The foundational research question that guides this projects is how have the transformations in capitalism, the state and technology impacted the strategies, goals and social horizon of social movement based organizing across the 20th and 21st century…
The Changing Nature of Teams in Social Media
Social media has changed the ways organizational members communicate and build relationships both within and between teams. The impact of new information communication technology has been particularly strong in the case of large multinational organizations, which have invested billions of dollars into technology development. More recently, enterprise social media has impacted organizations of all shapes and sizes…
Social Movement Media and Communications Warfare: User-Generated Discontent
Jack Bratich is researching the intersection of social movements and social media. This project has resulted in two published pieces, one on the institutional power bases of Facebook’s role in the Egyptian uprising of 2011: “Kyber-Revolts: Egypt, State-friended Media, and Secret Sovereign Networks” in The New Everyday: A Media Commons Project (2011). The second examines Occupy Wall Street as a flashmob and platform for meme and media production: “Occupy All the Dispositifs,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, (11:1, 2014, pp. 64-73). Most recently…
Explore Globally, Aggregate Locally – ContextMiner
ContextMiner is a framework to collect, analyze, and present the contextual information along with the data. It is based on an idea that while describing or archiving an object, contextual information helps to make sense of that object or to preserve it better. ContextMiner provides tools to collect data, metadata, and contextual information off the Web by automated crawls…
What’s so social about media?
A special issue of MIS Quarterly edited by Aakhus, Ågerfalk, Lyytinen, and Te’eni challenges researchers to consider what makes media social. Their introductory essay argues that as humans find ever more sophisticated ways to integrate symbolic action into technical systems and technical systems into symbolic action there is a commensurate need to advance our methods and concepts for engaging the deep computerization of social life that blurs old dualisms between physical and social, material and digital, and signifier and signified. These issues…
Designing Common(s) Ground for Open Innovation in Healthcare
This project investigates how open innovation could be a viable strategy for health organizations in the emerging networked society with its reliance on advanced information and communication technology (ICT). Health organizations have increasingly embraced their role as centers for innovation, and while much attention has focused on technology transfer, translational research and even social innovation, what is less clear is…
