Information School News

Dr Farida Vis , Director, Visual Social Media Lab and Research Fellow at the Information School is working on a rapid research response focused on the images of three-year old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi after his body was found on Bodrum beach in Turkey, 2 September 2015. The report, which will be launched on the 11 th of November, involves 15 short contributions from leading researchers and practitioners. The report examines the iconic photographs, taken by Turkish journalist Nilüfer Demir to draw further attention to the Syrian refugee crisis. It examines four main areas: 1.      How social media responded to the image and the ways in which it spread from mainstream media to social media platforms. 2.      The impact of the image in terms of political and personal responses and short and longer-term political effects. 3.      The impact of the image on social media from a historical perspective consid...

Dr Farida Vis , Director, Visual Social Medial Lab , Research Fellow at the Information School and Pia Mancini, Director, Net Democracy are working on a WEF project which examines algorithmic accountability and governance. Farida and Pia both sit on the Global Agenda Council on Social Media 2014-2016 and f urther information on the project can be found here . The WEF Summit on the Global Agenda 2015 , is   currently being held in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

On 22 May Patrick Meier visited the University of Sheffield and gave a talk on Digital Humanitarians which was hosted by the Visual Social Media Lab , the Digital Society Network and the Sheffield Institute for International Development .   Patrick’s talk focused on the use of big data and social media during humanitarian crises including the Haiti and Nepal earthquakes of recent years.  He discussed a number of key issues surrounding digital humanitarians, which is emerging as an area of cross disciplinary research.  One particularly important and topical issue is that of image verification, which resonates with an area of the Visual Social Media Lab’s work.   In society today many images get shared on social media, but why do false images get shared and how does this cause rumours to spread?  Patrick argues there is a need for impact evaluations and secondary research into images on social media – a topic which students may potentially be interes...

We are pleased to invite you to a talk on ‘Digital Humanitarians’ by Patrick Meier. Patrick is an internationally recognized thought-leader on humanitarian technology and innovation and he will be speaking about the use of Big Data and social media during humanitarian crises. See abstract for full details. Date: Friday 22 May Venue: ICOSS Conference Room, University of Sheffield Time: 14:00-16:30 ( talk: 14:00-15:30 with coffee and tea served afterwards ) Registration: This talk is open to all, but registration is required as places are limited to 55. Please add your name to this form  to register. This talk is hosted by the Visual Social Media Lab , the Digital Society Network and the Sheffield Institute for International Development . We look forward to seeing you next Friday! If you have any questions, please contact Farida Vis: f.vis@sheffield.ac.uk Digital Humanitarians - The information overflow that occurs in the wake of a disaster can paralyze humani...

Dr Farida Vis will speak at the Politics of Big Data Conference at King's College London on 8 May 2015. Her speech is part of the masterclass series on big data, with the session on 8 May focusing upon interventions in big data politics.  Farida will speak about visual cultures in social media and will discuss work which is being carried out by the Visual Social Media Lab  to develop methodological and theoretical strategies for capturing and interpreting social media image data. More information about the conference can be found on the conference website .

Congratulations to Professor Paul Clough, Dr Gialuca Demartini and Dr Farida Vis for their recent funding success in relation to the following projects. Paul Clough and Gianluca Demartini gained funding for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (studentship) with the National Archives on 'Investigating entity-centric methods for information exploration and discovery in digital archives'. The aim of this research project is to investigate entity-centric methods for supporting users as they explore and navigate the UK Government Web Archive. This would allow users to explore the archive based on entities such as people, places, locations and events in addition to search and navigation based on the content itself. Forming an entity network structure over the Government Web Archive based on Linked Data would also allow connection with existing resources, such as DBPedia and Freebase. The network structure can also be used to create additional features, such as recommendati...

On Friday 27 February Dr Farida Vis, Faculty Research Fellow based in the Information School, will host a session at the Future Everything Conference in Manchester. The What Now For...The Weird and Wonderful session will celebrate the weird and wonderful aspects of the internet through a series of talks, stories and Q&As.  The session takes place between 14:00 and 16:10 in Manchester Town Hall. More information about this leading arts, technology and cultural conference can be found on the Future Everything website .  

Well done to Wasim Ahmed, Information School PhD student, who has won a historical Twitter prize from Texifter to receive Enterprise access to  DiscoverText  for three months, and  Sifter  credit for up to three historical Twitter days up to 200,000 tweets. Wasim was one of five winners, and the only one from the UK, the other winners coming from the US and France. More information is available on the Textifer blog . Wasim's PhD focuses on 'Pandemics and epidemics: User reactions on social media and Web 2.0 platforms'. He is being supervised by Professor Peter Bath and Dr Farida Vis.  The Information School already has very good relationships with both Texifter and Discover Text through Farida and her work. Stuart Shulman, CEO of Texifter visited the School last year at Farida's invitation and gave a seminar on accessing Twitter data .

Farida Vis, Faculty Research Fellow, has been elected to the Big Boulder Initiative Board of Directors. The Big Boulder Initiative is dedicated to the advancement of social data in businesses and organizations of all kinds. The BBI bring together representatives from companies within the ecosystem to collectively address key challenges in order to establish the foundation for the long-term success of the social data industry. Alongside Farida, two other new board members were elected: Justin De Graaf, Global Media Insights Director at The Coca-Cola Company and Mark Josephson, CEO of Bitly. The BBI board is chaired by Chris Moody, VP for Data Strategy at Twitter. In an official press release he welcomed the new board members by stating: “On behalf of myself and the entire board of directors, we are excited to have three new voices join the discussion as we kick-off 2015. With these additions, we have strong representation from the social data ecosystem that will help us drive our...

On Wednesday 26 November Dr Farida Vis is presenting a masterclass on using social media in public engagement.   Farida will be using the successful social media engagement (and various impact measurements) around the recent Picturing the Social: Analysing Social Media Images conference as an example. This one day conference was part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science.  Early booking is for the masterclass is recommended, and you can book online now .

Faculty Research Fellow Farida Vis has just come back from Dubai where she attended the World Economic Forum’s Summit on the Global Agenda. The summit offers an opportunity for members of the Global Agenda Councils to meet in person and discuss the most pressing issues identified within their council and connect these to wider global concerns. All councils started their new two-year terms this September: The Global Agenda Councils make up the world’s largest volunteer network of experts. Every two years the network brings together leaders, pioneers and experts from business, government, international organizations, academia and civil society to provide innovative thinking on critical global issues and incubate projects, events and campaigns for the public good. In the 2014-2016 term, experts will be grouped into 86 councils, each addressing a specific issue. A full list of councils can be found  here . Farida serves (for a second term) on the  Global Agenda Council...

Following a successful launch event and a research incubator, the University’s Digital Society Network’s next event will take place on 21 November 2014.  The Information School is represented by a number of staff members in the Network, including steering group members Professor Paul Clough, Professor Elaine Toms, Dr Andrew Cox and Dr Farida Vis. The event offers an opportunity to build upon shared research interests and to progress ideas for collaborative research.  Reports on events and activities supported by the Digital Society Network will be given at the event and details of the next round of calls for proposals to bid for money from the Network will be discussed.  There will also be an opportunity to discuss ideas with the steering group. More information about the Digital Society network can be found on their website .  The event is open to all and refreshments will be provided.  Please contact Dr Andrew Cox by emailing a.m.cox@sheffield.ac....

For the second year running, a word relating to photographic practice has been named as Word of The Year by Collins English Dictionary . 'Photobombing’, like ’selfie’ (last year’s winner), has been found to represent something of the themes and spirit of popular discourse over the preceding twelve months.  ' Picturing the Social '   is the world's first cross-platform academic research project into social media images from those taken during breaking news to selfies, photos of friends and practices like 'photobombing'.   Dr Vis said: “The overall aim of the project is to develop approaches for studying a wide range of images shared on social media. This includes images created specifically for social media on smartphones as well as those re-used from a variety of other sources.” Anne Burns, Research Associate on the Picturing the Social project and expert on photographic self-representations said: “The photobomb is a moment of transgression, in which ...

Dr Farida Vis of the Information School has been asked to serve a second term on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media .  Council members include Deb Roy of MIT and Chief Media Scientist at Twitter.  Several new members have been appointed to the Council who have a particular focus upon issues around journalism and data story telling.  Newly appointed members include: Emily Bell   - Professor of Professional Practice and Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism , Columbia Journalism School Mohamed Nanabhay   - Former Head of Online, Al Jazeera English, now   signalnoi.se Claire Wardle   - Senior Social Media Officer, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), formerly at Storyful, the world's first social media news agency    Xavier Damman   - Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Storify Dr Vis’ current ESRC funded ‘Picturing the Social’ project was featured in the re...

Yesterday, Farida Vis of the Information School gave a presentation at the first Social Media for Researchers: A Sheffield Universities Social Media Symposium (full programme details available  here ). The aim of this first symposium was to encourage researchers to maximise the potential of social media, both for their research and for their careers as researchers. A wide range of topics were covered, including  trends in social media relating to research and researchers, advice on establishing an effective online presence, the use of social media as research data, social media's role in enhancing academic conversations as well as a range of approaches (such as  Altmetrics ) for dissemination and measuring scholarly output.   The symposium was organised by the  Sheffield Hallam Researcher Development Programme ( SHaRD )  and The University of Sheffield's Research and Innovation Services ( R&IS ) and was aimed at research staff and post-gr...

The University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind event takes place between 18 and 28 September 2014, bringing together academics and industry professionals to showcase their research and bring it to life. Saturday 20 September sees the Resilient Cultures event take place as part of the Festival of the Mind.  This event explores open technology and resilience and participants can get involved in a variety of hands on activities during the event.   Two of these activities relate to Information School projects: Jo Bates’ current weather datum project and Farida Vis’ everyday growing cultures project . The Resilient Cultures event is open to everyone and will give adults and children alike the chance to try out activities that relate to Information School research projects.  The event takes place in the University’s Firth Court building and admission is free. 

Pictures shared on Twitter around the death and funeral of Margaret Thatcher will be examined as part of the world’s first academic research project studying the explosion of images now shared across different social media platforms and apps, led by Dr Farida Vis of the Information School. Thanks to smartphones, most people now carry a camera with them at all times and use it to document different aspects of their lives – sharing more than 750 million social media images daily. For the Thatcher research, academics have so far collected nearly 150,000 tweets containing images directly shared on Twitter and have downloaded 17,000 different images.  This research can shed light on how a range of different types of images are used on Twitter to express opinions, discuss news and collectively remember well-known people and events. The ‘Picturing the Social’ project is the first to explore the impact images of this kind have on society. This includes images taken during brea...

Congratulations to Dr Jo Bates and Dr Farida Vis of the Information School who have recently been awarded funding for some of their work.   Jo has been awarded funding in collaboration with Professor Hamish Cunnigham (Department of Computer Science) and local artist Bo Meson, for a two day Festival of the Mind event called ‘Open Data | Open Hardware: Resilient Cultures’.   With the advent of cheap, easily configurable computing devices (of which the UK's Raspberry Pi is the most prominent example), and the opening of significant amounts of data for anyone to use and re-use, the boundary between creative culture and information engineering is re-opening.   The event, which will be held on Friday 19 th and Saturday 20 th September, will celebrate developments in open hardware, open data and maker culture.   It will bring together collaborations between extraordinary performance, science and engineering practitioners with around a dozen exhibits plus a r...

The World Economic Forum has recognised the contribution of Dr Farida Vis to its flagship Outlook on the Global Agenda 2014 publication. The report highlights Farida's research into the spread of rumours on Twitter during the London riots.

Farida Vis' paper “Farida Vis (2013) Twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news, Digital Journalism, 1:1, 27-47, DOI:10.1080/21670811.2012.741316 .” has been identified as a key academic paper for 2013 digital media scholarship by the Journalist's Resource project, which is based at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. Over the course of the year the project reviewed around 800 papers from around 30 journals and selected 12 final highlights including Farida’s. Farida’s paper has now had nearly 3500 views and is the second most read article in the journal so far. It was written as a follow on to The Guardian's ' Reading the Riots ' project.