Big data and computational methods help us to answer big social questions. At the Computational Media Lab, we’re dedicated to tapping the powerful potential of diverse digital data to understand the current implications and future impact of media messages. The Computational Media Lab is a collaborative incubator for cutting-edge research on social media through the use of big data, machine learning and other emergent methods. Based in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas’ internationally recognized Moody College of Communication, the lab brings together an interdisciplinary team of faculty and graduate students to explore challenging and timely issues through research about platforms including TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. We spend more time working with your social media interactions than our own.
The Computational Media Lab is helmed by founder and director Dhiraj Murthy (Ph.D, University of Cambridge), who joined the Journalism and Sociology faculties at UT Austin after 3 years as a Reader of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. This is Murthy’s third ‘think tank’: He also co-directed the Centre for Creative & Social Technologies at Goldsmiths and founded the Social Network Innovation Lab at Bowdoin College. His research targets many of the same areas analyzed in this lab, including social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, big data quantitative analysis and virtual organizations. He wrote the book on Twitter.