More than two-thirds of Americans get their news from social media sites, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center study. But more than half who read news on social media expect it to be inaccurate. Penn State researchers are working to improve the prediction of people’s trust in what they read online. In a new project, they’ll advance state-of-the-art machine learning methods to model the psychological phenomenon known as memory illusion.
A team of researchers, including several from Penn State, is working to refine a coding scheme to identify social media messages that could be useful to emergency responders.
How do regional opinions on Twitter represent real-world attitudes toward climate change? A team of researchers will work to find out, thanks to a recent seed grant from the Social Science Research Institute at Penn State.
Penn State’s Social Science Research Institute is seeking teams to develop innovative research programs using Twitter data.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 is on Twitter, delivering University news 140 characters at a time.
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.
