About the Lab

Update: The Collective Action and Social Media Lab at Illinois Tech is no longer recruiting students at Illinois Tech. Libby Hemphill moved to the University of Michigan. Illinois Tech students affiliated with CASM are still doing their work, but we won’t be adding any projects at Illinois Tech.

We currently have three major research projects:

• Understanding and Designing Social Media for Civic Engagement
• Cyberbullying Early Warning and Response
• Celebrities, Fans, and Social Media

We are interested both in where and how social media fit into civic engagement and fandom and how technologies can be designed to enable people to do new things. We use participatory design methods to work with civic organizers and fans to build new social media tools. We also use machine learning, natural language processing, and other approaches to data mining in analyzing big social data.