As a part of getting new users to test our Sifter beta, every month this summer we are awarding 12 #datagrants to academics. These prizes shave thousands of dollars of costs off of your research. The August social data and tools prize winners were: Kelli S. Burns, Ph.D. University of South Florida School of Mass Communications “I will look at the #icebucketchallenge during a particularly active time in the campaign (mid-August 2014) when several celebrities were creating a lot of attention for their videos. I plan to explore the celebrity impact on tweets as well as specific mentions of ALS in tweets about the campaign. I am also interested in conversation themes related to the campaign and how other organizations hijacked the hashtag for their own gain.” @KelliSBurns Kathleen PJ Brennan PhD Candidate at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Political Science “I hope to use my data and software prize to study the influence of internet memes on political interest and awareness. This particular analysis will form part of a dissertation chapter on internet memes, which examines such memes as emergent agents in the overlaps of online and offline spaces. This will be my first opportunity to incorporate such data into my dissertation, and I can’t wait to get started!” @katiepbrennan Aminu Bello Phd Research Student Marketing “To analyse data from social media To find out the role of social media in CRM Data will be collected primarily from facebook and twitter pages” Ann Pegoraro Laurentian University School of Sports Administration and I am the Director of the Institute for Sport Marketing, a research center at the university “I plan on using the Texifter Data and software to further my research work in social media use in sport. In particular, the historical data will be used by my colleagues and I to investigate how the use of Twitter by athletes, teams/organizations and fans has evolved over time.” @SportMgmtProf Susan Currie Sivek Linfield College Mass Communication “I will use the prize to continue to study the relationship between journalism and social media. I am especially interested in how magazines use these media to connect to their audiences.” @profsivek Dimitrinka Atanasova Research Associate (CascEff) and PhD student Media and Communication, University of Leicester “I plan to study information sharing about obesity, specifically I hope to identify the sources behind the web links that are shared most. For my recently submitted PhD I analysed obesity-related news articles from selected online newspapers, and while it can be expected that content from these should be among the most shared, I would like to see what other information sources are read/shared.” @dbatanasova Hassan Zamir University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science “The Texifter data prize will be primarily used as the data for writing my dissertation which focuses on how and what citizens and expatriates of Bangladesh reported about the Shahbag Movement during 2013 in Twitter. A content analysis of these tweets will be helpful to get an insight about the protest, it’s primary issues, protesters, and their concerns. The data will be useful for understanding how social media tools like Twitter increases democracy, civic engagement, and social empowerment. A potential outcome of this research will be designing a computer supported tool for better understanding worldwide social movements and mitigate the social crisis issues quickly.” @hassan_zamir Jacob Groshek Boston university Emerging media “I plan to look at how people use social media in a smoking cessation program. Or follow other emergent social situations, like Ferguson or Gaza.” @jgroshek Yunkang Yang University of Washington Department of Communication “I would use it to extract historical posts to study online discourse regarding a major public event in China in 2012, as well as the access to discover text to cleanse, code and visualize the data. I hope to group those posts into categories to show the levels of contention in discourse and to reflect the role social media play in facilitating public debate.” @yangyunkang Will Frankenstein Carnegie Mellon University Dept. Engineering & Public Policy / Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems “I will be using the data to explore how individuals communicate and discuss technological risk as expressed on social media. I will be focusing on discussions of nuclear proliferation. The prize is especially helpful for gauging and distinguishing the immediate social media response vs. the long-term response of major events related to nuclear materials, such as Fukushima and New START.” Micah Altman MIT Libraries: Program on Information Science “We will experiment with PowerTrack to pilot to integrate dynamic corrections to official statistics. We will experiment with DiscoverText to perform collaborative evaluation of transparency in government data and websites.” @drmaltman
