I am interested to learn how information travel around digital platforms. So, I use social computing, data science, machine learning, social network, and content analysis techniques to explore various types of information shared online spaces like social media, websites, and blogs.
This research investigates the effectiveness of Library Guides (LibGuides) for Fact-Checking. It aims to understand how undergraduate students specifically from the regional universities use those to fight misinformation during COVID-19. This is an IMLS grant project and is under review.
Misinformation, Conspiracy Theories, Twitter
Many conspiracy theories such as #StopTheSteal, #RiggedElection, and #SharpieGate evolved on Twitter during the 2020 US Election. These fraudulent claims were used to undermine the Presidential Election results. This study examines the content propagation and networks that emerged on Twitter conversations.
COVID-19 Tweets and South Asia
This project looks at the Bangladeshi Twittersphere and investigates how people of Bangladesh tweeted COVID-19 issues. These particular Global South voices are underrepresented in the existing literature. This study aims to close this gap and add new knowledge so that relevant decision-making can take place effectively.
"Nowadays, social media has a pivotal role in political communication. Politicians, parties, and the public engage in social networks like Twitter or Facebook. This panel focuses on election campaigns and the policy‐making process in social media. How do politicians use social media during elections?" Learn more here.
This is my dissertation project. I explored how Twitter was used during the 2013 Shahbag movement by the residents and expatriates of Bangladesh worldwide. Here you can get an online copy of my PhD dissertation on social media protest.
Twitter, has been used by the protesters during worldwide social movements as the means of organization, communication, and diffusion of protest information. Key protesters play significant roles in the information diffusion process and influence the protest network by disseminating specific types of information. The focus of this work is to investigate how information diffusion takes place on Twitter during a social movement. Learn more here.
Our collaborations among a number of researchers at the University of South Carolina investigated how hurricane-affected people communicated public libraries over Twitter to avail emergency information services. More can be found here.
How college students save information online? Which systems do they use to save retrieved information? We explored their search system use strategies for information retrieval. The project results are available here.
Does the unconscious influence us in our decision-making? We used subliminal psychodynamic activation (SPA) to examine the influence of the unconscious in information searching. Our results from the controlled-lab experiments can be found here.
Zamir, H. (2020). Cybersecurity and Social Media in Hsia-Ching Chang & Suliman Hawamdeh (Eds.), Cybersecurity for Information Professionals (pp. 153 – 171). Taylor & Francis Group.
Liu, J., Zamir, H., Li, Y., & Hastings, S. K. (2018). Search systems and their features: What college students use to find and save information. Library & Information Science Research, 40(2), 118-124. Retrieve from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0740818817303055
Liu, J., Tu-Keefner, F., Zamir, H., & Hastings, S. K. (2017). Social Media as a Tool Connecting with Library Users in Disasters: A Case Study of the 2015 Catastrophic Flooding in South Carolina. Science & Technology Libraries, 36(3), 274-287. Retrieve from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0194262X.2017.1358128
Liu, J., Albright, K., & Zamir, H. (2016, March). The role of the unconscious in information retrieval: What user perception tells us. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM on Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (289-292). ACM. Retrieve from https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2854986
Zamir, M. H. (2014). Diffusion of protest information in Twitter during Shahbag movement of Bangladesh. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 51(1), 1-4. Retrieve from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/meet.2014.14505101131
For detailed list of my research works, conference presentations, and workshops please visit the Google Scholar profile.