What would you do with a million tweets?

Most of Libby Hemphill’s recent research uses tweets as a significant data source for understanding how social media shapes political discussion, how social media is used as an instrument of power, and how social media fits within the broader media landscape. In this talk, she’ll give a quick overview of what she’s done with a million tweets from politicians, television audiences, gamers, and activists and invite the audience to discuss what other research we could do with a million tweets. This exercise will help us understand the limits of social media data, challenge us to address the problems inclusion and representation researchers face when using social media data, and if we’re lucky, help us identify potential collaborations for future research.

About Libby

Libby Hemphill is an assistant professor of communication and information studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She earned her MS in human-computer interaction and PhD in information from the University of Michigan. Her recent work has focused on how users leverage Twitter to influence public and social policy. She is especially interested in how people people marshal information and communication technologies in service of social change and in the ethics and pragmatics of big social data.

Libby Hemphill will speak as part of "In the Loop", a lecture series on design, innovation and entrepreneurship organized by IIT Institute of Design faculty. The series engages a wide range of speakers that present on topics ranging from theoretical research and emerging methodologies that are relevant to the field of design as well as personal narratives and examples from current design practice.