The Network Influence and Information Curation Lab studies influence and influential actors on social networks and the ways information is curated on those networks.
The Network Influence and Information Curation Lab studies influence and influential actors on social networks, generally in the context of social media, and focusing on the ways information is curated on those networks. The lab uses mixed methodologies such as content analysis, network analysis, interviews, and computational analysis. The lab takes an information centric approach to emerging network phenomena across social media and social actors.
Why Going Viral Matters
Jeff Hemsley talks about his research examining information flows in social media networks, how the structure of networks influences the flow of information, and how those flows in turn alter the networks.
Team
Jeff Hemsley is an Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and Director of the Center for Computational and Data Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Washington’s Information School. His research is about understanding information diffusion, particularly in the context of politics, in social media. He is co-author of the book Going Viral (Polity Press, 2013 and winner of ASIS&T Best Science Books of 2014 Information award and selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2014), which explains what virality is, how it works technologically and socially, and draws out the implications of this process for social change.
Alexander O. Smith is a 5th year Ph.D. student at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. His research is focused on memetics: the study of memes. Alexander is dedicated to forwarding theory and methods of classification, evolution, and flow of culture as an informational phenomena. His primary data involve visual media on various social media platforms which he interprets through a lens of Cultural Analytics and informational difference.
Yiran Duan is a 3rd year Ph.D. student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. Her current research interests are at the intersection of social media influencers and social network analysis. Specifically, she is interested in exploring how influencers broadcast information by using hashtags in social movements. She approaches this research area by applying both qualitative and quantitative methods to the #BlackLivesMatter data the lab collected from Twitter. Her most recent work explores how Dribbble.com may impact the Design industry and education by conducting interviews with designers using this platform.
Qunfang Wu (qunfangwu.com) received her Ph.D. in Information Science and Technology from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Her research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and social justice. She strives to challenge how socio-technical systems enable the construction and propagation of inequalities and advocate for design justice perspectives and practices. Her work has been published in places of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), the ACM Transactions on Social Computing (TSC), the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and the International Conference on Digital Government Research (DG.O).
Christy Joseph Khoury
Dhwani Gandhi is a 2nd year graduate student pursuing Applied Data Science at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. She is inclined towards using data science techniques, such as machine learning and statistical modeling for analyzing structured and unstructured data. She is particularly focused on building predictive models to transform data into actionable insights.
Hrishikesh Mahesh Telang is an Information Management and Data Science Master’s student at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. For the lab, he develops research tools using Python and MongoDB. His research interests are in the domain of Computational Social Sciences with a special focus on social media, opinion research, politics, and sociology. He is highly interested in performing psychological analysis of people using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. to understand relationships between their psychology and the kinds of content they post.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Smith, A. O., & Hemsley, J. (2022). Memetics as Informational Difference: Offering an Information-Centric Conception of Memes. Journal of Documentation, 78(5), 1149–1163. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2021-0140
Yoon, N., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., Simpson, E., & Eakins, J. (2022). Super-Amplifiers! The Role of Twitter Extended Party Networks in Political Elections. Policy & Internet, ahead-of-print, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.295
Conference Papers
Bratt, S., & Smith, A. O. (forthcoming). Evolutionary Archives: The Unlikely Comparison of GenBank and Know Your Meme. 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data).
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., & Kelly, R. (2022). Disrupting Design: A Multi‐level Technological Transition Study of Dribbble. com. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 55-66.
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., Dhwani, G., & Gray, L. (2022). Curating Virality: Exploring Curated Logics Within #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. The 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Dublin, Ireland.
Hemsley, J., Stromer-Galley, J., Rossini, P., & Smith, A. O. (2021). Staying in Their Lanes: Issue Ownership in the 2016 and 2020 US Presidential Campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. The 21th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Virtual Event (due to COVID-19).
Stromer-Galley, J., Hemsley, J., Rossini, P., Smith, A., & Bolden, S. (2020). Does Anyone Talk About the Issues Anymore? The 2016 US Presidential Candidates’ Messaging on Facebook and Twitter. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. The 20th Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, Virtual Event (due to COVID-19).
Presentation/Poster
Smith, A. O., Tacheva, J., & Hemsley, J. (2022). Visual Semantics of Memes: (Re)Interpreting Memetic Content and Form for Information Studies. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pra2.731
Gray, L & Duan, Y. (2020) Abundant spaces: Exploratory analysis of community-based qualitative research in LIS, 2017-2019. Poster at the Proceedings of the Annual Conference of Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS), Ontario, Canada
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., Gray, L., & Gandhi, D. (2022). Who Talked about What Regarding Derek Chauvin’s Trial: A Work‐In‐Progress Analysis. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 59(1), 681-683.
Book Chapter:
Gray, L., & Duan, Y. (2021). Positioning Social Justice in a Black Feminist Information Activist Community Context: A case study of African American activist-mothers in Chicago’s public housing. In Social Justice Design and Implementation in Library and Information Science. Routledge.
