Kate Starbird is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). She also holds courtesy appointments as Adjunct Professor in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) and the Information School at UW. Kate's research is situated within human-computer interaction (HCI) and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how information-communication technologies (ICTs) are used during crisis events. Specifically, her work seeks to understand and describe how affected people, emergency responders and remote individuals come together online, often forming emergent collaborations, to respond to major crisis events. Kate earned her PhD from the University of Colorado at Boulder in Technology, Media and Society and holds a BS in Computer Science from Stanford University.
In this talk, I offer an overview and present early findings from a collaborative project that examines online rumoring in the context of crisis events. The project has duals goals: 1) enhancing our understanding of why and how rumors spread on Twitter after crisis events; and 2) developing methods for detecting rumors using the "collective intelligence" of the crowd. This presentation will cover our efforts in both of these regards. Additionally, I will talk about the methods that we are evolving for doing mixed-method research on "big" social data.