User:Mutine des abers

I am a doctoral student at [University of Washington, Information School]. My focus is in crisis informatics in the Middle East. Broadly I am concerned with how people in conflict areas exchange critical & non-critical information, develop their own communication tools and engage in storytelling & sharing via the internet.

With my advisor, Prof. David McDonald, we are working to develop online cultural assessment tools. Far from being lessened, cultural confusions encountered on the internet have been profoundly increased by the availability of language and data translation tools. Especially susceptible to misinterpretations are short form communications such as Twitter, comments forms and other short textual entries. This study will focus specifically on developing a tool which will allow internet users to identify the religiosity of online, short form Arabic language texts. Specifically my work is looking at religiosity in Arabic and English short-form texts.

I am continuing work on a Twitter data mining project regarding the conflict in Syria. This project has many facets including a sentiment, linguistic and network analysis as well as new methods development.

My longer-term work involves refugees and information systems. I have worked with refugee information projects since the late 90's. My primary question is: How do refugees, whose social networks have been torn apart, maintain and recreate their communities? One innovative way that displaced peoples have restored social ties, created new institutions, searched for assistance and found accurate information has been through the innovative adaptation of information communications technologies (ICT’s). ICT’s include wireless, wired and computer communication technologies. I propose a comparative analysis of social media use by refugees in Jordan. My purpose is to understand how these tools are used by refugees in times of disaster, what the similarities and differences in use look like, and how those tools may assist in repatriation or resettlement.

I received a Masters in International Studies from the Henry. M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. My region of focus is the Middle East specifically the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Syria. My research interests are digital social media use by communities in distress. My graduation work was divided into two focus papers:

ethnographic research on the short lived Independent Media Center in Palestine, 2002
assessing sentiment and political variables from Twitter mining regarding the current crisis in Syria

A. M. Majid

أميرة ماجد‬‎

PhD student

Information School, University of Washington Seattle USA