Farida Vis

Farida Vis is a Faculty Research Fellow in the Information School at the University of Sheffield, holding a degree in Media and Cultural Studies and a PhD focused on the print media representation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, during the period of the ‘peace process’ in the early 1990s.

Working at Manchester Metropolitan University’s Department of History of Art and Design, she found a very rich interdisciplinary context for media-focused PhD. Her research in ‘Big Data and Social Change’, focusing on social media, Big Data, data journalism, and citizen engagement has been followed by a focus on ‘The Futures of the Visual Web’, closely in line with the remit of the Visual Social Media Lab.

She develops critical methods and tools for analysing social media data and has worked in this area for nearly a decade. She has undertaken various high profile interdisciplinary (cross-sector) projects in this area, for example, the leading of the social media analysis on ‘Reading the Riots on Twitter’, which examined 2.6 million riot tweets following the UK summer riots in 2011. This was a collaborative academic project with The Guardian and Twitter and received a lot of (media) interest at the time. She also sits on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social Media and was recently elected to the Big Boulder Initiative’s Board of Directors. She is also a regular public speaker. She sits on the Editorial Boards of several new journals, including Big Data & Society and Social Media & Society. Currently she advises a number of UK research councils on developing funding opportunities in social media research, for example through the ESRC’s Big Data Network Phase 3 Working Group.