Jennifer Stromer-Galley

Professor

220 Hinds Hall | Phone: (315) 443-1823

jstromer@syr.edu

Overview

Jennifer Stromer-Galley is Professor in the School of Information Studies and Director for the Center for Computational and Data Sciences. She is an affiliated faculty member with the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and with the Department of Political Science, and she is Past President of the Association of Internet Researchers.

Jenny has been studying "social media" since before it was called social media, studying online interaction and strategic communication in a variety of contexts, including political forums and online games. She has published over 50 journal articles, proceedings, and book chapters. Her award-winning book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford University Press), provides a history of presidential campaigns as they have adopted and adapted to digital communication technologies. She is a Fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. The Fellowship supported a collaborative research project, Illuminating 2016, studying the 2016 presidential campaign by collecting and analyzing the candidates' and public's postings on social media. Stromer-Galley is Principal Investigator of an $5.2 million project called Trackable Reasoning and Analysis for Collaboration and Evaluation (TRACE) project. Funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Program Activity (IARPA), the project aims to experiment with reasoning, reporting, and crowdsourcing techniques to improve analysis (read more). She is also co-PI on a Twitter Conversational Health grant to study various dimensions of problematic conversation on the platform, and on a WhatsApp grant to study political misinformation in Brazil. Mentoring the next generation of scholars and social entrepreneurs is something she particularly enjoys.

Research

Jennifer Stromer-Galley studies human interaction with and through digital technologies. Her wide-ranging work has explored why people talk politics online, what practical addition deliberation can bring to e-government, and she has developed a coding scheme to assess the qualities of political discussion. In related work, she has joined with computer scientists to develop algorithms to automatically assess roles in online group discussion, including leadership and influence. Her personal interest in games has led to fruitful research efforts to understand the normative dynamics in virtual worlds, and to develop predictive models to identify key behavioral indicators of real world characteristics in virtual environments. She helped lead a multi-university consortium to develop educational games to teach students about cognitive biases that impair good decision-making (see: http://www.albany.edu/news/19508.php for a press release about the project). Currently she is Principal Investigator of an $5.2 million funded project to build an application to aid with analysis and decision making, the TRACE project. Her book, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age (Oxford University Press). provides a history of U.S. presidential campaigns since 1996 and the ways they have adapted to digital media. The book received the Roderick Hart Top Book Award for the Political Communication Division of the National Communication Association. Jenny was a Tow Fellow for Digital Journalism at Columbia University in 2016 to research how presidential campaigns and the public are using social media to talk about the 2016 campaign. She has published over 50 peer reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, and has been involved in funded research totalling more than $25 million.

Teaching

Personal

Teaching