For a final project in my "Islam in Western Contexts" class, I decided to explore the English-language discourse surrounding Islam and Muslims on Twitter. In class we had discussed how Orientalism can be perpetuated by traditional print and broadcast media. As social media are beginning to fill similar roles as traditional media platforms, I wanted to compare the discourse. I used the Twitter streaming API to gather tweets and used network visualizations and content analysis to understand how Orientalism was a characteristic of social media discourse. Using a hashtag co-occurrence graph, I looked for evidence of bot influence. I then qualitatively coded tweets to elicit Orientalist themes.
I had the opportunity to work with other members of the emCOMP lab while studying the role of botnets in propagating alternative narratives related to the 2015 Paris Attacks and Umpqua Community College shooting on Twitter. Our work followed information flow around a "shared audience" network graph - we used mixed methods analysis to label communities of users and understand their interactions.
I love being able to study topics that are so politically and culturally relevant - our work was even featured on the local news. Publications Alternative Narratives of Crisis Events: Communities and Social Botnets Engaged on Social Media A. Conrad Nied, Leo Stewart, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird Poster Presentation at CSCW 2017 https://doi.org/10.1145/3022198.3026307 Working with a team of three other HCDE students, I developed a Tableau visualization that displayed both bike thefts and bike racks in Seattle, with the goal of allowing users to find a safe place to park their bike. My role was primarily data collection and cleaning, although I also assisted with designing and building the Tableau visualization. The visualization also allowed users to filter by year to view temporal bike theft trends.
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