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SC&I’s Naaman to Study How People in Different Communities Use Social Media
December 2010
The National Science Foundation has awarded Mor Naaman of the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers its Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award, one of the agency’s most prestigious honors in support of early-career researchers and educators.
Naaman, assistant professor of library and information science, will receive more than $497,000 from the NSF to study social media systems and the patterns that social media communication reveals among geographical communities across the globe.
The NSF CAREER awards recognize teacher-scholars who effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. The projects funded by CAREER awards should build a firm foundation for a lifelong research career.
Naaman’s graduate class in social media is an example of how his teaching activities will be integrated with research in this area.
“The proposed project looks at social media systems as information systems, and uses the published data to teach us something about society, culture, language, communities, or geographies,” Naaman said. “The social media class helps students develop an understanding of the dynamics and social forces in play in these systems, and as a result, develop new ideas on how to use these data at scale.”
Naaman has previous funding from the NSF as well as awards from Google and Nokia to study social media information. This project will focus on people’s aggregate social media use over a multi-year period in an effort to map out large-scale geographic and temporal patterns that can provide insights to urban planners, sociologists, health officials, and others.
“Location information is increasingly available from systems like Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare,” said Naaman, who as a research scientist with Yahoo!, worked extensively with data from Flickr, once the largest set of user-contributed geotagged data available on the Web. “Location was a key driver of potential insights for this project, and it was a good time to examine it again.”
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