Welcome to the Hi Da Lab

Hi Da Lab is a network of researchers from various academic disciplines who work on interdisciplinary research projects.

Hi Da Lab’s mission is to use big, medium, and small data using computational methods to tackle health issues in the contemporary information ecosystem from interdisciplinary perspectives. We aim to use new data sources and novel techniques to make a real-world impact. 

Hi Da is a place to inspire and support researchers and students from different backgrounds to work in a collaborative environment to shape and complete their innovative projects. 

Examples of our current research projects include: 

• Is eating disorder content on TikTok informative or misleading? Does user engagement with eating disorder content on TikTok differ based on the content themes and information quality? 

• What are the main themes of misleading information during COVID-19, and why do their prevalence vary across media platforms?

• Did the WHO communicate effectively with the public during COVID-19 via Twitter?

• Tweeting Through the Pandemic: Exploring COVID-19 Frames and Public Engagement on Twitter 

• Who shares health and medical research on Facebook? What are the Facebook-friendly health and bio-medical research and why?

• Can social media bridge the gap between science and society?

• Who disseminated bot-generated tweets related to the school shooting in Parkland?

• The impact of geographic inequality in federal research funding: A comparative longitudinal study of research and scholarly outputs in EPSCoR versus non-EPSCoR states

News

• Samaneh Borji received the 2024-2026 Institute for Information Literacy at Purdue research grant.

• Valerie Vera received Eugene Garfield Dissertation Fellowship.

• Conducting a large-scale survey across 20 countries to explore the use, benefits, barriers, and trust associated with Generative AI.

• Through analysis of 600K tweets about COVID-19 and applying the framing theory, we found that trending Twitter hashtags can identify frames that reflect public opinions in a health crisis and measure public attention to those frames. This study is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research 

• In collaboration with The Office of the Vice President for Research at UofSC, I am leading a project that aims to evaluate the impact of NSF’s EPSCoR and NIH’s IDeA programs. More information

• Our paper was accepted in the National Communication Association (NCA) 107th Annual Convention/ Public Relations Division

• Presented as a keynote at Altmetrics 20 about “science and society in the age of disinformation”.

• Received $25,000 grant from The UofSC Office of the Vice President for Research to study COVID-19 misinformation on YouTube.

• Our paper is accepted to be published in Journal of Information Science! We found big data is no longer limited to computer science research, but it influences other academic disciplines such as education, urban informatics, business, health, and medical sciences. Download Preprint.

• Our research is published in Information Processing and Management. We Identified biomedical research papers attracting more Facebook interest and measuring relationships between Facebook and citation counts for these articles  Preprint /Publisher version   

• Our paper spotlights by the Society for Scholarly Publishing.

• A great trip to Silicon Valley to visit high tech companies. You can read stories of these visits LinkedIn + Google, Facebook + Instagram, Pinterest, eBay and, Verizon Innovation Center