Eric Gilbert, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, has been named a fellow in the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership (DERP), founded by several prominent online social communities to explore how publicly available data can be used for ethical academic inquiry into the social dynamics of online groups and websites.
As a DERP Fellow, Gilbert will be on the group’s advisory committee to help guide social research policies and operations. Gilbert’s leading work in social computing is focused on the design and analysis of social media, and his research group at Georgia Tech, the comp.social lab, also builds experimental web systems. Some of his recent work includes research on phrases that predict Kickstarter success, popularity of selfies on Instagram, predictors for gaining Twitter followers, and using social inferences for faster e-commerce product ratings. The Association of Computing Machinery’s special interest group on Human-Computer Interaction research, ACM SIGCHI, has recognized Gilbert’s work with four best paper awards and two nominations.
“DERP presents a great opportunity for the research community to engage with large online communities in an open and ethical way,” says Gilbert. “We’re all very excited to see where this alliance takes us.”
DERP is designed to allow researchers easier access to public data beyond the likes of Facebook and Twitter and create broader opportunities for academic studies of online communities while respecting the privacy of users. Researchers will be able submit requests through DERP to use public data from any or all of the five partners in the group. These include reddit, twitch, Fark, imgur, and StackExchange. The research supported by DERP also will be made publicly available.
DERP, founded this year, plans to facilitate an active online research community by enabling better cross-platform analyses in academic research. The online partner communities in DERP will be able to work more closely together and address research questions through the collective approach.
The current 17 DERP Fellows are actively using social data from the member websites in their research. Among the fellows are researchers from Stanford, Columbia University, MIT, UC Berkley and others.
To find out more about DERP, visit http://derp.institute.
