ICPSR welcomes new Resource Center for Minority Data Director Libby Hemphill
ICPSR is pleased to announce the addition of our new director for the Resource Center for Minority Data (RCMD). Libby Hemphill will be joining us as the new RCMD director, and as Associate Research Professor at ICPSR, and Associate Professor in the University of Michigan School of Information, on September 1.
Hemphill comes to us from the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she is Associate Professor of Communication and Information Studies in the Lewis College of Human Sciences. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan's School of Information. Her research is interdisciplinary and draws on theory and methods from communication studies, information science, and computer science to investigate online behavior. Her greatest scholarly impact has been in the area of political expression in social media, in particular the development of the #Polar Score which can be used to identify the partisan valence of a Twitter stream (e.g., allowing determination of an individual politician’s partisan orientation). Hemphill’s current research, supported by the National Science Foundation, examines how social media can be used by rural and marginalized urban populations to increase civic engagement. Her research and engagement with the changing role of data and data access to underrepresented and marginalized communities fits with and will provide a valuable basis for leadership of the Resource Center for Minority Data at ICPSR.
We are very excited about the leadership that Hemphill will bring to RCMD and ICPSR. Please join us in welcoming her!
Sincerely,
Margaret C. Levenstein
Director, Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research
Research Professor, Institute for Social Research and School of Information
Adjunct Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy, Ross School of Business
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1248
Aug 24, 2017