The Influentials: New Approaches for Analyzing Influence on Twitter

This report represents a first stab at moving beyond follower count, a commonly accepted but imprecise indicator of influence on Twitter. We evaluate 12 twitterers with high follower counts, calculating each user's capacity to generate retweets, mentions, and replies, and show how these more granular measures relate to different dimensions of online influence.

Detecting Sadness in 140 Characters: Sentiment Analysis and Mourning Michael Jackson on Twitter

At its peak, the conversation about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter proceeded at a rate of 78 tweets per second--how can we understand and process such a data-rich instance of 'digital mourning'? My colleagues and I developed a tool to measure sentiment on Twitter and, in this report, use #MJ tweets to test its reliability

The Iranian Election on Twitter: The First Eighteen Days

After alleged voting fraud in Iran's 2009 presidential election, Twitter played an essential role in publicizing an otherwise carefully censored political upheaval in Iran. In this report, my colleagues and I identify the key players and contribution patterns of this "twitter revolution" based on analysis of over 2 million relevant tweets.

Ethics at Play: Patterns of Ethical Thinking Among Young Online Gamers

Based on interviews with 14 online multiplayer gamers conducted as part of my work for the Good Play Project, I describe in this paper how games confront young people with sophisticated ethical dilemmas and argue that games should be used to foster perspective-taking, consequence-projection, and rule-based thinking skills. (chapter in a forthcoming book)

Male Sexual Networking Websites and the Rise of Online STI Prevention Outreach

For my college thesis, I explored how the public health establishment has responded to popular websites that facilitate "risky" offline sex between men. By interviewing outreach workers and analyzing these websites, I discovered that such sites have created new conflicts and alliances in the long-standing struggle between health and sex. (download here)