Dr Timothy Cribbin
Senior Lecturer

Research area(s)

• Information visualisation
• Information retrieval
• Text mining
• Interaction design / HCI
• Digital libraries
• Social media analytics

Research Interests

I'm primarily interested in how we can process, model and interact with large text collections in order to uncover useful insights. My research career has broadly focused on designing and evaluating algorithms, interaction models and end-user tools that support search, navigation, exploration and sense-making within connected information spaces like scholarly publications and social media (e.g. Twitter). My early work focused on the use of interactive visualisation to support search and sense-making in digital document collections, primarily using the distance-similarity or spatial-semantic metaphor. Key contributions in this area included the application of geodesic distance and second-order similarity transformations to optimise the balance between local and global semantic structure in spatial layouts. This was followed by work exploring the use of citation-enhanced information retrieval in scholarly databases (e.g. citation chain aggregation) and then, most recently algorithms and tools to support social media based research (see Chorus:http://chorusanalytics.co.uk). Whilst I still maintain an interest in information visualisation, I am now mainly focused on developing and applying text and citation analytics techniques to live social-media research contexts. This specifically includes author profiling and community detection for demographic/interests-based sampling and classifying UGC according to stance (i.e. sentiment or intent).

I am usually open to new collaborations and PhD supervisions, in any of the above areas.