Dhiraj Murthy is a Professor of Journalism and Media Studies (in the Moody College of Communication), Sociology (by courtesy), and School of Information (by courtesy) at the University of Texas at Austin. His research explores social media and: race/ethnicity, health, virtual organizations, and natural disasters. He employs qualitative/mixed methods and machine learning/computational methods. Dr. Murthy has edited 3 journal special issues and authored over 85 articles, book chapters, and papers; he wrote the first scholarly book about Twitter (second edition published by Polity Press, 2018). Dr. Murthy was named one of the World’s Top 2% of Scientists in Stanford University’s 2023 list for the fields of Communication & Media Studies and Sociology.

Dr. Murthy is currently funded by: the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute on Drug Abuse for a study entitled  Modified Use of e-cigarettes and Marketing on YouTube (Project Number: 1R01DA049878-01A1; $1,327,846); by the National Institute of Minority Health & Health Disparities for a study entitled Social Media, Acculturation and E-cigarette Use among Mexican American College Students in South Texas (Project Number: R01MD017280; $3,758,038), and by Good Systems at the University of Texas at Austin for a study entitled Designing Responsible AI Technologies to Curb Disinformation ($750,000). He was recently funded by the National Science Foundation’s Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) Division for pioneering work on using the social media networks of journalists for  damage reconnaissance during Hurricane Florence (CMMI grant #1902460). Dr. Murthy’s work also uniquely explores the potential role of social technologies in diversity and community inclusion.

Dr. Murthy founded and directs the Computational Media Lab (Twitter feed) at UT Austin, a large lab with over 20 graduate and undergraduate students (and several high school interns). He is co-editor of the high impact journal Big Data & Society (IF=8.731). Dr. Murthy has chaired and co-chaired international social media conferences and serves on the advisory board of MediaWell, an initiative by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). Dr. Murthy can be contacted at dhiraj[dot]murthy[at]austin.utexas[dot]edu. My publications are below.

Book | Journal Articles | Edited Volumes | Chapters | Proceedings | Preprints

Book

Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age. 2013 (1st edition) and 2018 (2nd edition), with Polity Press. Winner of ALA CHOICE Prize. (Selected Reviews: ICS, Discourse & Society, Transfers, #NSMNSS, IJICST, BD&S) | Video Interview. [Amazon US | Amazon UK | Kindle | Free Google Books Version]

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles (all are first-authored unless otherwise noted)

‘Sociology of Twitter / X: trends, challenges, and future research directions‘, Annual Review of Sociology (sole author; accepted), 2024. (PREPRINT)

‘Normalization of Vaping on TikTok: A Mixed-Methods Approach Using Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Qualitative Thematic Analysis‘, Journal of Medical Internet Research (second author with Jung S., Bateineh B.S., Loukas A., and Wilkinson A.V.), (accepted/in press) DOI: 10.2196/55591

‘Content Analysis of YouTube Videos Related to E-Cigarettes and COVID-19’, Substance Use & Misuse, (third author with Lee, J., Ouellette, R.R., and Kong, G.), 59:1, 143-149, 2024.

‘Influence of User Profile Attributes on e-Cigarette–Related Searches on YouTube: Machine Learning Clustering and Classification’, JMIR Infodemiology (lead author with Lee, J., Dashtian, H., Kong, G.), article 42218, 2023.

‘Moving Emergency Response Forward: Leveraging Machine-Learning Classification of Disaster-Related Images Posted on Social Media‘, Journal of Management Information Systems (second author with Johnson, M.*, Robertson, B.W.*, Smith, W.R.*, and Stephens K.K), 40(1):163-182, 2023.

‘Using artificial intelligence to identify emergency messages on social media during a natural disaster: A deep learning approach‘, International Journal of Information Management Data Insights (with Powers, C.J.* (lead author), Ashqeen, K.*, Devaraj, A.*, Dontula, A.*, Joshi, A.*, Shenoy, J.*), 3(1):100164, 2023. (PDF)

‘COVID-19 Misinformation Detection: Machine Learned Solutions to the Infodemic’, JMIR Infodemiology (third author with Kolluri, N.L.*, Liu, Y.*), 2022;2(2):e38756, 2022.

‘Understanding e-cigarette content and promotion on YouTube through machine learning‘, Tobacco Control (fourth author with Kong, G., Schott, A.S.*, Lee, J., and Dashtian, H.), 2022.

‘An exploration of e-cigarette-related search items on YouTube’,  Journal of Medical Internet Research (second author with Dashtian H. and Kong G.), 24(1):e30679, 2022

‘I know what you did on Venmo: Discovering privacy leaks in mobile social payments‘, Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (fourth author with Tandon, R.*, Charnsethikul, P.*, Arora, I.*, and Mirkovic, J.), 2022(3):1-22, 2022. (PDF) (video abstract) [Covered in MEL and Eureka]

‘Make Tweets Great Again: Who are opinion leaders, and what did they tweet about Donald Trump?‘, Social Science Computer Review (third author with  Aguiar, I.* and Yoo, Joseph J.*), 40(6), 1456–1477, 2022.

‘A Different Type of Disaster Response Digital Volunteer: Looking Behind the Scenes to Reveal Coordinating Actions of Disaster Knowledge Workers‘, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management (fourth author with Smith, W. R.*, Robertson, B. W.*, and Stephens, K. K.), Vol. 29: 116– 130, 2021.

‘Evaluating Platform Accountability: Terrorist Content on YouTube‘, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 65 (6): 800-824, 2021. (pre-publication PDF) (publisher’s PDF)

‘Variations in the temporal structure of sociability across American cities‘, Sociology (with O’Brien, J.D., Gross, A., and Meyers, N.*), Vol. 55(1): 30-55, 2021. (pre-publication PDF) [Nominated for this year’s SAGE Prize for Innovation and Excellence]

‘CoVerifi: A COVID-19 News Verification System‘, Online Social Networks and Media (second author with Kolluri, N. L.*), Vol. 22: Article 100123: 1-13, 2021. (pre-print PDF) (PDF at publisher) [tool]

‘CML-COVID: A Large-Scale COVID-19 Twitter dataset with Latent Topics, Sentiment and Location Information‘, Academia Letters (second author with Dashtian, H.), Article 314: 1-9, 2021. (open-access PDF at publisher, local PDF; arXiv pre-print)

‘Understanding the meaning of emoji in mobile social payments: Exploring the use of mobile payments as hedonic versus utilitarian through skin tone modified emoji usage‘, Big Data & Society (with Sudarshan, S.*, Lee, J.*, Ghosh, C.*, Shah, P.*, Xiao, W.J.*, Arora, I.*, Unger, C.*, and Acker, A.), Vol 7(2): 1-18, 2020. (open access PDF at Sage, local PDF)

‘From Hashtag Activism to Inclusion and Diversity in a Discipline‘, Communication, Culture, and Critique, Vol. 13(2, June 2020): 259–264, 2020. (PDF) (pre-publication PDF)

‘Machine-learning methods for identifying social media-based requests for urgent help during hurricanes‘, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (second author with Devaraj, A.* and Dontula, A.*), Vol. 51: Article 101757: 1-12, 2020. (PDF)

‘What is Venmo? A descriptive analysis of social features in the mobile payment platform‘, Telematics and Informatics (second author with Acker, A.), Vol. 52: 101429, 2020. (PDF)

‘Throw Me a Lifeline: Articulating Mobile Social Network Dispersion and the Social Construction of Risk In Rescue Communication‘, Mobile Media & Communication, (third author with Stephens, K. K. and Robertson), Vol. 8(2): 149-169, 2020. (PDF)

‘Differences in Health-Related Social Media Usage by Organizations and Individuals‘, Telemedicine and e-Health (third author with Ahn, J.* and Jeon, Y. A.*, Vol 26(6): 812-820, 2020. (PDF)

‘Development of a Health Communication Campaign to Promote the Texas Prescription Monitoring Program‘, Health Marketing Quarterly, (multi-authored with Mackert, M. as lead author), Vol 37(3): 222-231, 2020.

‘Using a combination of human insights and “deep learning” for real-time disaster communication‘, Progress in Disaster Science, (third author with Robertson, B. W., Johnson, M., Smith, W. R., & Stephens, K. K). Vol. 2(July): Article 100030, 2019. (PDF)

‘Using social media to call for help in Hurricane Harvey: Bonding emotion, culture, and community relationships‘, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, (fourth author with Li, J., Stephens, K.K., and Zhu, Y.), Vol. 38: Article 101212 , 2019. (PDF)

‘Visualizing YouTube’s comment space: online hostility as a networked phenomena‘. New Media and Society, (with Sharma, S.), Vol 21(1), 191–213, 2019.

‘Heat Not Burn Tobacco Promotion on Instagram‘, Addictive Behaviors, (second author with Kreitzberg, D. S., Loukas A., and Pasch, K.), Vol 91:112-118, 2019.

‘Introduction to Social Media, Activism, and Organizations‘, Social Media and Society, January-March: 1-4, 2018 (PDF).

‘Comparative Process-Oriented Research Using Social Media and Historical Text‘, Sociological Research Online, Vol 22(4): 3-26, 2017.

‘Pace of Life in Cities and the Emergence of Town Tweeters‘, Sage Open, (second author with Gross, A. and Varshney, L.) Volume 7(4), 2017 (PDF).

‘Social media processes in disasters: Implications of emergent technology use‘, Social Science Research, (with Gross, A.), Volume 63: 356-370, 2017 (PDF).

‘Visual Social Media and Big Data. Interpreting Instagram Images Posted on Twitter‘, Digital Culture & Society, (with Gross, A. and McGarry M.*), Volume 2(2): 113–134, 2016. (PDF)

‘Bots and Political Influence: A Sociotechnical Investigation of Social Network Capital‘, International Journal of Communication IJoC, (with Powell, A.B., Tinati, R., Anstead, N., Carr, L., Halford, S.J., and Weal, M.), Volume 10(2016): 4952–4971, 2016. (PDF)

‘Urban Social Media Demographics: An Exploration of Twitter use in Major American Cities’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, (with Gross, A. and Pensavalle, A.*), Volume 21(1): 33–49, 2016. (PDF)

‘Who tweets about cancer? An analysis of cancer-related tweets in the US’, Digital Health, (with Eldredge, M.*), Volume 2:1-16, 2016 (PDF).

‘Do we tweet differently from our mobile devices? A study of language differences on mobile and web-based Twitter platforms’, Journal of Communication, (with Bowman, S.*, Gross, A., McGarry, M.*), Volume 65(5): 816–837, 2015. (PDF) [Covered by Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Times, MSN, US News & World Report, The Daily Mail, and other major press]

‘Twitter and Elections: are tweets, predictive, reactive, or a form of buzz?‘, Information Communication and Society, Volume 18(7): 816-831, 2015. (PDF)

‘Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media, Collaboration, and Organizations‘, American Behavioral Scientist, Volume 59(1): 3-9, 2015.

‘Social Media, Collaboration, and Scientific Organizations‘ American Behavioral Scientist (with Lewis, J.P.*), Volume 59(1),  pp. 149-171, 2015. (PDF)

‘Comparing Print Coverage and Tweets in Elections: a Case Study of the 2011-2012 US Republican Primaries‘, Social Science Computer Review (with Petto, L.*), Volume 33, No. 3, pp. 298-314, 2015.

‘Big Data Solutions On a Small Scale: Evaluating Accessible High Performance Computing for Social Research‘, Big Data and Society (with Bowman, S.*), Volume 1(2), pp. 1-12, 2014. (Video Introduction | PDF)

‘Modeling virtual organizations with Latent Dirichlet Allocation: A case for natural language processing‘, Neural Networks (second author with Gross, A.), Volume 58, pp. 38-49, 2014.

‘The Use of Social Media to Foster Trust, Mentorship, and Collaboration in Scientific Organizations’, Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society (with Mawrie, S.* and Hastings, C.*), Vol. 34(5-6), pp. 170–182, 2014. (PDF)

‘Introduction: Special Issue on Collaboration, Organisations and Social Media‘, International Journal of Organizational Design and Engineering, Vol.3, No.2, pp.115 – 120, 2013. (PDF)

‘Building trust in virtual organisations: a case study of trust and gender in a scientific virtual organisation breeding environment‘, International Journal of Organizational Design and Engineering,  Vol.3, No.2, pp.185 – 205, (with Eldredge, M.*), 2013. (PDF)

“The potential for virtual communities to promote diversity in the sciences”, Current Sociology, vol. 61  no. 7,  1003-1020 (with Rodriguez, A.* and Kinstler, L.*), 2013.

‘Twitter and Disasters: the uses of Twitter during the 2010 Pakistan floods‘, Information Communication and Society (with Longwell, S.*), Volume 16, Issue 6, 2013, pp. 837-855.

‘New Media and Natural Disasters: Blogs and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami’, Information, Communication and Society, Volume 16, Issue 7, 2013, pp. 1176-1192. (PDF)

Ethnographic Research 2.0: The Potentialities of Emergent Digital Technologies to Qualitative Organizational Research, Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Vol. 2 Iss: 1, 2013, pp.23 – 36. (PDF)

‘Towards a Sociological Understanding of Social Media: Theorizing Twitter‘, Sociology, vol. 46 no. 6 pp. 1059-1073, 2012. (PDF)

‘Twitter: Microphone for the Masses’.  Media Culture Society 33(5):779-789, 2011. (PDF)

“Nationalism Remixed? The Politics of Cultural Flows between the South Asian Diaspora and ‘Homeland’“, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33:8, 2010  (PDF)

Muslim punks online: a diasporic Pakistani music subculture on the Internet, South Asian Popular Culture, Volume 8, Issue 2 July 2010, pages 181 – 194.  (PDF)

“Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research”, Sociology, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp. 837-855. 2008. (PDF)

“A South-Asian American diasporic aesthetic community? Ethnicity and New York City’s ‘Asian electronic music’ scene”, Ethnicities, Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 225-247. 2007.  (PDF)

“Communicative flows between the diaspora and ‘homeland’: The case of Asian Electronic Music in Delhi”,Journal of Creative Communication, Vol. 2. Nos.1&2, pp. 143-161. 2007.  (PDF)

“Representing South Asian alterity? East London’s Asian electronic music scene and the articulation of globally mediated identities.”, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 327-346. 2009.  (PDF)

Edited Volumes (Editor)

Special Issue on Social Media, Activism and Organizations, Social Media and Society, January-March, 2018.

Special Issue on Social Media, Collaboration and Organizations, American Behavioral Scientist, Volume 59 No.1, 2015.

Special Issue on Collaboration, Organisations and Social Media, International Journal of Organisational Design and Engineering, Volume 3 No. 2, 2013.

Chapters in Books

‘Coding Twitter data using qualitative and computational methods: A mixed methods framework’ in  The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (Sloan, L. and Quan-Haase, A. eds.), pp. 533-545, Chapter 37. Thousand Oaks, CA.: SAGE, 2022. (PDF)

‘Acquiring Data’ in Smith, V., Bateman, J., and Jackson, D. (eds.) Perspectives for Influence Operations Investigators. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2022. (free HTML version)

‘The ontology of tweets: Mixed methods approaches to the study of Twitter‘ in The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (Sloan, L. and Quan-Haase, A. eds.), pp. 559-572, Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2017. (PDF)

‘Critically Engaging with Social Media Research Methods’ in An End to the Crisis of Empirical Sociology? Trends and Challenges in Social Research (McKie, L. and Ryan, L. eds.), pp. 81-97, Routledge, 2016. (PDF)

‘Facebook’ (encyclopedia entry) in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Consumption and Consumer Studies (Cook, D.T. and Ryan, J. M. eds.), 5 pgs., Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2015. (PDF)

‘Dislike This: Facebook’s Experimental Ethics’ in Social Media in Social Research: Blogs on Blurring the Boundaries (Woodfield, K. ed), pp. 87-89, London: Sage, 2014. (PDF)

‘Emergent Data Mining Tools for Social Network Analysis‘ in  Data Mining in Dynamic Social Networks and Fuzzy Systems (Bhatnagar, V. ed.), pp 40-57 , (with Gross, A. and Takata, A.*), 2013. (PDF)

‘Evaluation and Development of Data Mining Tools for Online Social Networks’ in Mining Social Networks and Security Informatics ( Özyer, T. et al. eds.) , pp 183-202 (with Gross, A., Takata, A.*, Bond, S.*), 2013. (PDF)

‘Facebook’ (encyclopedia entry) in Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online (Ritzer, G. ed.), Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2013.

‘Muslim Punks Online: A diasporic Pakistani music subculture’ in Dudrah, R. et. al (ed.) Intermedia in South Asia: The Fourth Screen, pp. 160-177, Abingdon: Routledge. 2012.

‘Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research’ in Hesse-Biber, S.N. (ed.) Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158-179. 2011. (PDF)

‘”Muslim Punk” Music Online: Piety and Protest in the Digital Age’  in K. Salhi (Ed.), Music, Culture and Identity in the Muslim World: Performance, Politics and Piety. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013 (PDF).

Published Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Rahman, Md M.*, Balakrishnan*, D., Murthy, D., Kutlu, M., and Lease, M., An Information Retrieval Approach to Building Datasets for Hate Speech Detection. Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021), Virtual conference, December 7-10, 2021. Preprint at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.09775.pdf

Rahman, Md M.*, Balakrishnan, D.*, Murthy, D., Kutlu, M., and Lease, M., Addressing Content Selection Bias in Creating Datasets for Hate Speech Detection. Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2021) Data-Centric AI Workshop Data-Centric AI Workshop, Virtual conference, December 14, 2021.

Unger, C.*, Murthy, D., Acker, A., Arora, I.*, and Chang, A.Y.* (2020). Examining the evolution of mobile social payments in Venmo. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Media and Society (ACM SMSociety 20), pp. 101–110. (Pre-Print PDF)

Johnson, M., Murthy, D., Robertson, B. W., Smith, W. R., & Stephens, K. K. (2020). DisasterNet: Evaluating the performance of transfer learning to classify hurricane-related images posted on Twitter. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Hawaii International Conference on Social Systems, Computer Society Press.  Maui, Hawaii, pp. 576-583. (Pre-Print PDF) (PDF)

Xin, E.*, Murthy, D., Lakuduva, N.*, & Stephens, K. K. ‘Assessing the stability of Tweet corpora for hurricane events over time: A mixed methods approach’ in Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Social Media and Society (ACM SMSociety ’19), Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada, pp. 59-66. (PDF)

O’Neal, A.*, Rodgers, B.*, Segler, J.*, Murthy, D.,  Lakuduva, N.*, Johnson, M.*, Stephens, K. (2018) ‘Training an Emergency-Response Image Classifier on Signal Data’. In Kantardzic & Sayed-Mouchaweh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Machine Learning and Applications (IEEE ICMLA’18).  Orlando, FL,  December 2018, pp. 751-756. (PDF)

Acker, A. and Murthy, D. (2018) ‘Venmo: Understanding mobile payments as social media‘, Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society. Copenhagen, Denmark, July 18 – 20, pp. 5-12. (PDF)

Stephens, K. K., Li, J.*, Robertson, B. W.*, Smith, W. R.* & Murthy, D. (2018) ‘Citizens communicating health information: Urging others in their community to seek help during a flood‘ in K. Boersma & B. Tomaszewski (Eds.) Proceedings of the 15th International ISCRAM Conference. Rochester, NY, 2018. (PDF)

Smith, W. R.*, Stephens, K. K., Robertson, B. W.*, Li. J.*, & Murthy, D. (2018) ‘Social media in citizen-led disaster response: Rescuer roles, coordination challenges, and untapped potential‘ in K. Boersma & B. Tomaszewski (Eds.) Proceedings of the 15th International ISCRAM Conference. Rochester, NY, 2018. (PDF)

Murthy, D., Rodriguez, A.*, Lewis, J.P.* (2013) ‘Examining the Formation of Swift Trust within a Scientific Global Virtual Team‘  in Proceedings of the 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, pp. 353-362. (PDF)

Murthy, D., Gross, A., Bond, S.* (2012) ‘Visualizing collective discursive user interactions in online life science communities’ Proceedings of Collective Intelligence, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. (PDF)

Murthy, D. (2012) ‘SNS Cyberinfrastructure and Incubating Global Virtual Teams’  in Proceedings of the 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Maui, Hawaii, pp.493-502.  (PDF)

Murthy, D., Gross, A., Oliveira, D. (2011) ‘Understanding Cancer-based Networks in Twitter using Social Network Analysis’  in IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing Proceedings. Palo Alto, California, pp. 559-566. (PDF)

Oliveira, D., Murthy D., Johnson, H., Wu, S. F., Nia, R., Rowe, J. (2011) ‘A Socially-Aware Operating System for Trustworthy Computing’, in IEEE International Conference on Semantic Computing Proceedings. Palo Alto, California, pp. 380-386. (PDF)

Murthy, D., Gross, A. & Longwell, S.* (2011) ‘Twitter and e-health: a case study of visualizing cancer networks on Twitter’ in Shoniregun, C. A. (ed.) International Conference on Information Society (i-Society 2011) Proceedings. London, UK, pp. 110-113. (PDF)

Pre-Prints

Norton, E.*, Thomas, T.*, Kolluri, A.*, Kim, T.H.*, Murthy, D. (2023), Temporal Analysis of Misinformation on Parler, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

Murthy, D., Caramanis, C., and Rudra, K. (2023), Understanding Lexical Biases when Identifying Gang-related Social Media Communications, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

Murthy, D., Dasari, T.*, Vinton, K.*, Lago Arroyo, F.*, Li, C.* and Clayton, P. (2023), Using Machine Learning, Social Media Images, and Journalists to Improve Disaster Resilience and Response. SSRN Preprints. (PDF)

Shankar, S.*, Murthy, D., Dashtian, H. (2023), Social Media COVID-19 Contact Tracing Using Mobile Social Payments and Facebook Data, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

Stobaugh, B.* and Murthy, D. (2023), Predicting Gender and Political Affiliation Using Mobile Payment Data, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

Kolluri, A.*, Vinton, K*. and Murthy, D. (2022), PoxVerifi: An Information Verification System to Combat Monkeypox Misinformation, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

Gillies, M., Murthy, D., Brenton, H.*, and Olaniyan, R.* (2022), ‘Theme and Topic: How Qualitative Research and Topic Modeling Can Be Brought Together’, arXiv preprint. (PDF)

(* indicates student co-author)

 

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