Title: Designing Human-Centered Technologies For Social Media Data Migrations

Date: Tuesday, May 18th, 2021

Time: 11:00 am - 1:00 pm (EST) 

Location (virtual): BlueJeans Link

https://bluejeans.com/2654318678

Adriana Alvarado Garcia

HCC Ph.D. Student

School of Interactive Computing

College of Computing

Georgia Institute of Technology

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Committee:

• Dr. Christopher A. Le Dantec (advisor) | School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Amy S. Bruckman | School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Munmun De Choudhury | School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. Yanni A. Loukissas | School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Dr. R. Stuart Geiger | Department of Communication and the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California, San Diego.
• Dr. Miguel Luengo-Oroz | United Nations Global Pulse, UN

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Abstract:

Social media platforms have proven to be an effective place for developing new approaches for a collective organization through the accumulation of crowdsourced information. Due to their unique affordances, like providing insights about local narratives, capabilities, and expertise from citizens, social media data have the potential to become a tool that works at scale to gather evidence useful for addressing human rights and community crises. However, effectively operationalizing the migration of social media data to institutional contexts so they can be used as evidence to inform interventions remains an understudied area within the discipline of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

The outcome of my research will provide a design framework and a set of contextualized tools that will allow NGOs to operationalize the process of turning user-generated content from social media platforms into evidence. My work will have a direct impact on the field of HCI by developing socio-technical strategies to mobilize social media data to identify, monitor, and leverage local community practices that may signal or support an ongoing response to human rights and community crises. 

Lastly, my research will contribute to understanding how to design sociotechnical systems that address the challenge of retaining the context of data at scale by advocating for an understanding rooted in the communities that produce and consume the data. By following this approach, I am examining the entire system of communities that the data are part of; with this, I am hoping to contribute to building more equitable technologies.

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