I am currently a PhD Candidate and a NSF Graduate Research Fellow at University of Colorado at Boulder (CU) in an interdisciplinary program called Technology, Media and Society at the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) Institute. My dissertation research focuses on the use of social media in the crisis context as it relates to emerging cultural heritage values and practices. I use virtual ethnographic methods to study the use of various social media technology during recent disasters as well as for other crisis events that have occurred over the past generation. I also investigate an emerging cultural practice that I have termed as “socially-distributed curation,” where members of the public collectively aggregate, filter, remix, preserve, and share stories back to the public in order to derive meaning from historical disasters for strengthening community resilience to future crises.
I am currently a research assistant in Professor Leysia Palen’s ConnectivITy Lab and Project EPIC research team. This is housed in the Human-Centered Computing area Department of Computer Science at CU conducting research in the area of Crisis Informatics. In 2005-2006, I also worked as a graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center at CU. I received my BA in Social Science specializing in Research and Analytical Methods with a minor in Information and Computer Science and in Digital Arts at University of California at Irvine. I also studied abroad at University of Sussex, England taking Geography and Cultural Studies courses.
You can find more information about me and my research at: http://sophiabliu.com