RESEARCH INTERESTS

RESEARCH PROFILE

Social informatics is the study of factors that shape ICT adoption and use. A major part of my work in the past 10 years has focused on new computational research tools and methods, of which data science represents the current generation. A particular interest has been applying data science in the large-scale study of uses of social media, beginning when I led a multidisciplinary team working with the Guardian/LSE on the Reading the Riots project, analysing tweets sent during the August 2011 riots. This work has continued with JISC, ESRC and EU Framework 7 support and in my work as a Turing Fellow, where I co-lead the social data science interest group.

I collaborated Dr Alex Voss of St Andrews University and Wire Free Productions, an independent media company, on the BBC Radio 5 Live Hit List, a weekly show covering the top 40 stories in social media.

As a member of CUSP, I am interested in the study of the impact of 'big data' on strategic and operational decision-making, including the use of social media by emergency services and the emergent role of social media in civil society and the everyday life of communities.

I am editor of the Health Informatics Journal and a member of the advisory board of the new journal Big Data & Society published by Sage. I have previously been on the editorial boards of Interacting with Computers and the International Journal of IT Standards and Standardisation Research. I was a co-editor of special issues of the Journal of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work on Collaboration and e-Research (2006), CSCW and Dependable Healthcare (2006) and the Social Science Computing Review Journal on e-Social Science (2009).

RESEARCH GROUPS

Human-Centred Computing Division

Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities

Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS

• Tolmie, P., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Liakata, M., & Zubiaga, A. (2017). Microblog Analysis as a Programme of Work. ACM Transactions on Social Computing.
• Webb, H., Housley, W., Procter, R., Edwards, A., & Jirotka, M. (2017). The ethical challenges of publishing Twitter data for research dissemination. ACM Web Science Conference. Best paper award.
• Zubiaga, A., Voss, A., Procter, R., Liakata, M., Wang, B., & Tsakalidis, A. (2017). Towards Real-Time, Country-Level Location Classification of Worldwide Tweets. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering.
• Tkachenko, N., Procter, R., & Jarvis, S. (2017). Predicting floods with Flickr tags. PLOS One.
• Tolmie, P., Procter, R., Rouncefield, M., Liakata, M., Zubiaga, A., Randall, D. (2017). Supporting the use of user generated content in journalistic practice. ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI). Best paper award.
• Wang, B., Liakata, M., Zubiaga, A., & Procter, R. (2016). TDParse-multi-target-specific sentiment recognition on Twitter. 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL).
• Zubiaga, A., Kochkina, E., Liakata, M., Procter, R., & Lukasik, M. (2016). Stance classification in rumours as a sequential task exploiting the tree structure of social media conversations. Proceedings of 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), December, pp. 2438-2448.
• Tkachenko, N., Procter, R., & Jarvis, S. (2016). Predicting the impact of urban flooding using open data. Royal Society Open Science, 3(5), 160013.
• Zubiaga, A., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Hoi, G. W. S., & Tolmie, P. (2016). Analysing how people orient to and spread rumours in social media by looking at conversational threads. PloS one, 11(3), e0150989.
• Webb, H., Burnap, P., Procter, R., Rana, O., Stahl, B.C., Williams, M., Housley, W., Edwards, A. and Jirotka, M. (2016). Digital Wildfires: propagation, verification, regulation, and responsible innovation. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 34(3), p.15.
• Greenhalgh, T., Shaw, S., Wherton, J., Hughes, G., Lynch, J., Hinder, S., Fahy, N., Byrne, E., Finlayson, A., Sorell, T. and Procter, R. (2016). SCALS: a fourth-generation study of assisted living technologies in their organisational, social, political and policy context. BMJ open, 6(2), e010208.
• Procter, R., Wherton, J., Greenhalgh, T., Sugarhood, P., Rouncefield, M. and Hinder, S. (2016). Telecare call centre work and ageing in place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 25(1), pp. 79-105.
• Bazerli, G., Bean, T., Crandall, A., Coutin, M., Kasindi, L., Procter, R. N., ... & Trewinnard, T. (2015). Humanitarianism 2.0. Global Policy Journal.
• Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Procter, R., & Greenhalgh, T. (2015). Designing Technologies for Social Connection with Older People. Aging and the Digital Life Course, 3, 107.
• Halfpenny, P., & Procter, R. (Eds.) (2015). Innovations in digital research methods. Sage.
• Wherton, Joseph, et al. Co-production in practice: how people with assisted living needs can help design and evolve technologies and services. Implementation Science 10.1 (2015): 75.
• Zubiaga, A., Liakata, M., Procter, R., Bontcheva, K., & Tolmie, P. (2015). Crowdsourcing the annotation of rumourous conversations in social media. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, pp. 347-353.
• Procter, R., Voss, A., & Lvov, I. (2015). Audience research and social media data: Opportunities and challenges. Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies 12 (1).
• Maniatopoulos, G., Procter, R., Llewellyn, S., Harvey, G., & Boyd, A. (2015). Moving beyond local practice: Reconfiguring the adoption of a breast cancer diagnostic technology. Social Science & Medicine, 131, 98-106.
• Housley, W., Procter, R., Edwards, A., Burnap, P., Williams, M., Sloan, L., ... & Greenhill, A. (2014). Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: A collaborative response. Big Data & Society, 1(2).
• Burnap, P., Williams, M. L., Sloan, L., Rana, O., Housley, W., Edwards, A., Procter, R., & Voss, A. (2014). Tweeting the terror: modelling the social media reaction to the Woolwich terrorist attack. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 4(1), 1-14.

• Procter, R., Greenhalgh, T., Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Rouncefield, M., & Hinder, S. (2014). The Day-to-Day Co-Production of Ageing in Place. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 1-23.

• Greenhalgh, T., Wherton, J., Sugarhood, P., Hinder, S., Procter, R., & Stones, R. (2013). What matters to older people with assisted living needs? A phenomenological analysis of the use and non-use of telehealth and telecare. Social Science & Medicine, 93, 86-94.
• Procter, R., Crump, J., Karstedt, S, Voss, A. and Cantijoch, M. (2013). Reading the riots: What were the Police doing on Twitter? Policing and Society, Special issue on policing and cybercrime.
• Procter, R., Vis, F. and Voss, A. (2013). Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Special Issue on Computational Social Science: Research Strategies, Design & Methods.
• Stewart, J., Procter, R., Poschen, M. and Williams, R. (2012). Academic publishers as innovation intermediaries in the development of Web 2.0 services for scholarly communication. New Media & Society, December. doi: 10.1177/1461444812465141
• Greenhalgh, T., Procter, R., Shaw, S., Wherton, J. and Sugarhood, P. (2012). The organising vision for telehealth and telecare: discourse analysis. BMJ Open 2012;2: e001574 doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2012-001574
• Hartswood M, Procter R, Taylor P, Blot L, Anderson S, Rouncefield M, Slack R. (2012). Problems of Data Mobility and Reuse in the Provision of Computer-based Training for Screening Mammography. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Austin, May.
• Lewis Paul, Newburn Tim, Ball James, Procter Rob, Vis Farida, Voss Alex. (2011). Reading the Riots: Investigating England's summer of disorder. Guardian/LSE.
• Black, A., Car, J., Anandan, C., Cresswell, K., Pagliari, C., McKinstry, B., Procter, R., Majeed, A., Sheikh, A. (2011). The impact of eHealth on the quality and safety of healthcare: a systematic overview and synthesis of the literature. PLoS Med 8(1): e1000387. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000387