Dr Farida Vis

Research Fellow in the Social Sciences

BA (Staffordshire University), PhD (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Professional standing

Editorial board member: Digital Journalism and JOMEC

Research interests

Before joining the iSchool in September 2012, I was a Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester. My work is centrally concerned with researching social media, crisis communication, data journalism and citizen engagement. I’m completing a textbook for Sage, Researching Social Media with computer scientist Mike Thelwall and at Leicester designed and ran an MA module based on the book. Before joining Leicester, I was an AHRC Research Associate in Media and Religion at Loughborough University, on a project that examined how YouTube users responded to anti-Islam film Fitna released online by Dutch politician Geert Wilders in March 2008. Between 2004 and 2009 I was ESRC Research Fellow in Transformations in Media, Culture and Economy at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, where some of my work focused on controversial images in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, analyzing online discussions on Flickr and responses from citizen journalists. My PhD (2007) examined the print media representation of the Palestine/Israel conflict in the early years of the so called ‘peace process’.

I am a founding member of Open Data Manchester and my data driven journalism work (for example on the future of allotments in the UK) has been published on The Guardian Data Blog and elsewhere in the mainstream media. I am a co-author on the Data Journalism Handbook, an innovative effort to address training and knowledge issues within the rapidly emerging field of data journalism. In the aftermath of the 2011 UK summer riots, I led the social media analysis on an academic team that examined 2.6 million riot tweets, part of the Guardian’s groundbreaking Reading the Riots project. The data visualization, built by The Guardian’s interactive team, accompanying this work, highlighting the spread of rumours on Twitter has won a Data Journalism Award at the inaugural ceremony for this new journalism award. Other crisis communication work examines public understandings of flu pandemics focusing on Amazon.com as an online knowledge broker.

I frequently present on social media methods, can be found at hackdays, data camps and aside from academic conferences, increasingly speak at technology conferences also. This year (2012) I have spoken at Lift 12 (video), TED Salon, London (video), Future Everything (slides + publication), the Open Knowledge Festival and will speak about Twitter influence at Emerce Eday and on social media and ‘big data’ at the ESRC and British Academy’s ‘Big Data Debate’. 

I tweet as @flygirltwo and sporadically blog at Researching Social Media.

I am interested in supervising PhD students in any area of social media research, crisis communication, data journalism as well as open data and big data issues.

Teaching activities

Although my Fellowship limits my teaching activities, I will be developing a postgraduate module based on my social media research, which will run from academic year 2013/2014.

Key publications

Books

Vis, F., and Thelwall, M., (forthcoming) Researching Social Media, Sage, London.

Peer reviewed journal articles

Vis, F., (forthcoming), ‘Twitter as a reporting tool for breaking news’, Digital Journalism 1(1).

Procter, R., Vis, F., and Voss, A., (2012, under review), ‘Reading the Riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data on Twitter’.

Thelwall, M., Sud, P. and Vis, F., (2012), ‘Commenting on YouTube videos: From Guatemalan rock to El Big Bang’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 63(3): 616-629.

Van Zoonen, L., Vis, F., and Mihelj, S., (2011), ‘YouTube interactions between agonism, antagonism and dialogue: Video responses to the anti-Islam film Fitna’, New Media & Society, 13(8): 1284-1300.

Mihelj, S., Van Zoonen, L., and Vis, F., (2011), ‘Cosmopolitan communication online: YouTube responses to the anti-Islam film Fitna’. British Journal of Sociology, 62(4): 613-632

Vis, F., van Zoonen, L. and Mihelj, S., (2011), ‘Women responding to the anti-Islam film Fitna: voices and acts of citizenship on YouTube’, Feminist Review, 97(1): 110-129.

Van Zoonen, L., Vis, F., and Mihelj, S. (2010), ‘Emerging citizenship on YouTube: activism, satire and online debate around the anti-Islam video Fitna’, Critical Discourse Studies, 7(4): 249-262

Toynbee, J. and Vis, F., (2010)  ‘World Music at the BBC World Service, 1942 - 2008: Public Diplomacy, Cosmopolitanism, Contradiction’, Media, Culture & Society, 32 (4): 547-564.

Faulkner, S., Leaver, A., Vis, F., and Williams, K., (2008), ‘Art for art’s sake or selling up?’, The European Journal of Communication 23 (3): 295-317.

Book chapters

Vis, F., Faulkner, S., Parry, K., Manyukhina, Y., and Evans, L., (in preparation), ‘Twitpic-ing the riots: analysing images shared on Twitter during the 2011 UK riots’, for edited collection, Twitter and Society, Peter Lang.

Vis, F., (in press). ‘Innovative Methods for Studying YouTube’ for edited collection (Editor: Linda Woodhead), Innovative Methods in the Study of Religion: Research in Practice, Oxford University Press.

Vis, F., (2009) ‘Wikinews reporting of Huricane Katrina’, in S. Allan and E. Thorsen (eds) Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang

Reviews

Vis, F., (2011) Lee Marsden and Heather Savigny (eds) (2009), Media, Religion and Conflict & Tanja Dreher and Christina Ho (eds) (2009), Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations on Gender, Race and Religion (review). European Journal of Communication, 26(2): 172-176.

Vis, F., (2008) Henry Giroux (2006), Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (review), Media, War and Conflict, 1 (2): 240-241.

Other publications

Vis, F., (2012), ‘Reading the Riots on Twitter: who tweeted the riots?’, Researching Social Media Blog, 24 January, http://researchingsocialmedia.org/2012/01/24/reading-the-riots-on-twitter-who-tweeted-the-riots/

Vis, F., and Manyukhina, Y., (2011), ‘The English Allotment Lottery’, Guardian Data Blog (10/11/2011), available on:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/nov/10/allotments-rents-waiting-list

Vis, F., (2011), ‘The Guardian Datablog’s Coverage of the UK Riots’, in Gray, J., Bounegru, L., and L. Chambers, The Data Journalism Handbook, available on: http://datajournalismhandbook.org/1.0/en/case_studies_8.html

Vis, F., (2011), ‘Growing back to the Future: Allotments in the UK, open data stories and interventions’, Data Driven Journalism (7/11/2011), available on:
http://datadrivenjournalism.net/news_and_analysis/growing_back_to_the_future_allotments_in_the_uk_open_data_stories_and_inter 

Vis, F., (2011), ‘Growing back to the Future: Allotments in the UK, open data stories and interventions’, ScraperWiki Data Blog (31/10/2011), available on: 
http://blog.scraperwiki.com/2011/10/31/growing-back-to-the-future-allotments-in-the-uk-open-data-stories-and-interventions/