Truth is stranger than fiction for creative writer Jared Yates Sexton
9/4/18
Jared Yates Sexton will read excerpts from both his nonfiction book and fiction works on Thursday, Sept. 6, when he visits Penn State Behrend to open the college’s Creative Writers Reading Series. We caught up with him in advance of his visit to discuss his newfound fame and how he’s juggling the writing of both fiction and nonfiction on a regular basis.
Improving disaster response through Twitter data
7/10/18
When disaster strikes, emergency responders often use social media data to understand the big-picture impact of an event. But thanks to an international team of researchers, organizations could soon have access to real-time, automatically generated summaries of the collateral impact of a disaster based on crowdsourced Twitter data.
IST researchers incorporate social media into emergency response
6/27/18
A team of researchers from the College of Information Sciences and Technology is working to develop a tool that could help 911 call centers integrate crowdsourced social media posts into their operations. The group is developing and testing software that expands on the information available to first responders upon arriving at an emergency scene.
IST grad students go social with internships at Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat
9/5/17
In the College of Information Sciences and Technology, Fei Wu, Hongjian Wang and Feng Sun -- all doctoral students in the college -- were sought out for their expertise with summer internships at Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook.
Can Twitter aid disaster response? New IST research examines how
8/17/17
With over 500 million tweets sent every single day, new research from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) is investigating innovative ways to use that data to help communities respond during unexpected catastrophes.
Twitter data changing future of population research
7/17/17
Guangqing Chi, associate professor of rural sociology and demography and public health sciences in Penn State's Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education and director of the Computational and Spatial Analysis (CSA) Core in the Social Science Research Institute, and his team have collected over 30 terabytes of geo-tagged tweets over the last four years.
Negative tweets can trash TV programs for other viewers
6/22/17
The impact of a negative online or social media comment about a television show may have more impact than a positive one. In a study, researchers found that people who saw negative comments about a television show while watching a clip were less likely to think that other people would like the show and that people would probably not recommend the show to their friends. This may have implications on how people use "second screens" -- their social media windows -- while watching news, entertainment and other programming.
Brandywine professor weighs in on NPR conversation about #ThanksForTyping
4/19/17
When National Public Radio (NPR) picked up an academic hashtag going viral on Twitter, it also reached out to Kathleen Kennedy, associate professor of English at Penn State Brandywine, for further information. The hashtag, #ThanksForTyping, showcased the unnoticed work of wives, left unnamed, who typed and edited manuscripts for their husbands in the mid-20th century
Graduate School launches @GradSchoolPSU on Twitter
3/24/17
The Graduate School at Penn State is now on Twitter. Through @GradSchoolPSU the Graduate School will be sharing important information, celebrating the achievements of graduate students, and interacting with its audience.
@Penn_State delivers news, school spirit to the Twittersphere
11/4/16
Penn State is on Twitter, delivering University news 140 characters at a time.
To thine own selfie be true
5/20/16
This spring, Leisha Jones, assistant professor of English in Penn State's College of the Liberal Arts, taught a course examining selfies and the genre's cultural, historical and social implications. She invited her class to help her suss out her big questions and examine their own preconceptions.
Penn State Greater Allegheny faculty's photographs featured in Wired magazine
10/20/15
Lori Hepner, associate professor of integrative arts at Penn State Greater Allegheny, had her work profiled recently in Wired magazine. The article describes how Hepner photographs images produced by programming "eight spinning LEDs [to] flash based on the binary code of each character in a tweet."
Industry group honors Lehigh Valley social media/digital billboard campaign
6/23/15
Tri Outdoor Inc. of Bethlehem won the national Best of Show award in the 2015 Watchfire Digital Billboard Awards for its digital billboard campaign for Penn State Lehigh Valley.
Most admired companies have room for social media improvement
6/11/15
Not all of America's most admired companies are killing it on social media. In fact, some are almost flat lining, according to a team of researchers.