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 PhD candidate (on the job market) at Syracuse University School of Information Studies. Their research is focused on memetics: the study of memes. Alexander is forwarding a novel theoretical framework for memetics which synthesizes older memetic theories with internet meme studies. This theoretical synthesis provides a post-digital theory of information dynamics, classification, and distribution of culture. Their developments empirically provide a relational visual methodology of “difference” which has roots with Bateson’s definition of information. Affiliated work can be found at Convergence, Journal of Documentation, ASIS&T, and the IEEE Big Data Conference Computational Archive Science workshop. More expansive research interests on (cross-)platform dynamics, network cultures, and classification can be found at Policy & Internet, Social Media + Society, eCSCW, and AoIR.
Yiran Duan is a PhD candidate at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. Her current research interests are at the intersection of opinion leaders and social network analysis through the lens of information flow life cycle. Specifically, she explores how information travels across platforms as well as the life span of information flows. She approaches her research topics by applying both qualitative and quantitative methods such as content analysis and machine learning models. Her work has been published in the Association of Information Science and Technology (ASIST), the iConference, the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), and the Social Media + Society journal.
Christy J. Khoury is a PhD candidate at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Her primary work examines TikTok and other prominent social media platforms as spaces for crisis discourse, especially in the context of Middle Eastern crises. She is particularly interested in technologies as places where sensemaking, resiliency, and cultural knowledges materialize. Her work has been in conferences such as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) and Association of Information Science and Technology (ASIST).
Una Joh is a Ph.D. student at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, specializing in computational social science. With a background in economics from her bachelor’s and master’s studies at SKKU in Korea, she conducts research on the flow of information and the dynamics of public opinion on social media, taking into account its interaction with news media. Her research aims to extract, track, and predict information flows and opinion dynamics on networks that model interconnected media environments. To achieve this, she utilizes a variety of methods, including natural language processing, network analysis, and agent-based modeling.
Former Members
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).
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.
Calvin Cousin is a PhD candidate at the College of Library Sciences and Communication at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS, Brazil) and a visiting scholar at Syracuse University. His research interests include digital influencers, disinformation and online discourse. Currently, his main research focuses on the role of celebrities in online discussions about disinformation during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Calvin has a background in Journalism, having taught Convergent Journalism and Communication and Museums courses at UFRGS, and is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).
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.
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. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.604
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., & Smith, A. O. (2023). “THIS TWEET IS UNAVAILABLE”:# BLACKLIVESMATTER TWEETS DECAY. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yiran-Duan-6/publication/378701978_THIS_TWEET_IS_UNAVAILABLE_BLACKLIVESMATTER_TWEETS_DECAY/links/65ef5733b1906066b28d4cdf/THIS-TWEET-IS-UNAVAILABLE-BLACKLIVESMATTER-TWEETS-DECAY.pdf
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., & Gray, L. (2023, March). Left and Right Retweets! Curation Logics During Black History Month. In International Conference on Information (pp. 131-142). https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1007/978-3-031-28032-0_11
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. https://asistdl.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/pra2.689
Duan, Y., Khoury, C., Smith, A. O., Joh, U., & Hemsley, J. (2023). Comparing Crisis Communication on TikTok and YouTube: A Case Study of the 2023 California Floods. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60(1), 949–951. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.908
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).
Khoury, C., Smith, A. O., Joh, U., Duan, Y., & Hemsley, J. (2023). Multi-Modal Crisis Discourse and Collective Sensemaking on TikTok. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 60(1), 203–212. https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.781
Smith, A. O. (solicited/forthcoming). Tactical Publishing: Using Senses, Software, and Archives in the Twenty-First Century: By Alessandro Ludovico, MIT Press, 2023, 324 pp, paperback ISBN: 9780262542050, ebook ISBN: 9780262362078. Information & Culture.
Smith, A. O. (2024). A History of Fake Things on the Internet: By Walter J. Scheirer, Stanford University Press, 2023, 264 pp, hardcover ISBN: 9781503632882, ebook ISBN: 9781503637047. Internet Histories, 0(0), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/24701475.2024.2346376
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.
Journal Publications
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., Joh, U., Gray, L., & Khoury, C. (2024). Curating Virality: Exploring Curated Logics Within #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter/X. Social Media + Society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241242799
Duan, Y., Asante-Agyei, C. O., Kelly, R., & Hemsley, J. (2024). A Practice Theory Perspective on Dribbble and the Evolving Design Industry. Social Media+ Society, 10(1), 20563051241228601.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051241228601
Smith, A. O., & Loewen-Colón, J. (2024). Memetic memory as vital conduits of troublemakers in digital culture. Convergence. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565241262421
Smith, A. O., Hemsley, J., & Tacheva, Z. Y. (2024). Reinforming memes: A literature review of the status of memetic information. Journal of Documentation, 80(4), 1003–1021. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-10-2023-0218
Duan, Y., Hemsley, J., Smith, A. O., Joh, U., Gray, L., & Khoury, C. (2024). Curating Virality: Exploring Curated Logics Within #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter/X. Social Media + Society, 10(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241242799
Duan, Y., Asante-Agyei, C. O., Kelly, R., & Hemsley, J. (2024). A Practice Theory Perspective on Dribbble and the Evolving Design Industry. Social Media+ Society, 10(1), 20563051241228601. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051241228601