 Kamil DemirhanResearch Assistant at Hacettepe University, Ankara. | Kamil Demirhan studies social movements on social media, focusing on political activism in Turkey and the Middle East. As a visiting fellow at CFI Kamil presented his project with the title: "Social Media Effects on the Gezi Park Movement in Turkey: Politics under Hashtags". This is a study of the role of social media in the Gezi Park movement in Turkey. The movement started as a protest of an environmentalist group then it turned into a social political movement. The protesters were opposed to the project of rebuilding Gezi Park and Taksim Square that is the public area at the center of Istanbul. Politicians, demonstrators, the public and media have agreed on the fact that social media had a significant role in this movement. Social media, especially Twitter, was regarded as the main reason of this movement. The effect of social media on politics on the development of social movements and political participation is often evaluated as an important topic in current academic studies. Kamil's study contributes to this literature by focusing on the role of social media in the Gezi Park movement. His analysis consists of Twitter functions, Twitter actors as users, and the forms of communication.
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 Meghan DoughertyPhD, Assistant Professor of Digital Communication at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Communication. | Meghan Dougherty studies the preservation of Web cultural heritage, research methods for Web history, and Web archiving as an emerging cyberinfrastructure for e-research. Dougherty has participated in a number of Web archiving projects for Webarchivist.org including the September 11 Web Archive and The Election Web Archives at the Library of Congress. She also built Wayfinder, a personalizable research interface for web archives, as an addition to the Webarchivist suite of research tools. Her forthcoming book, Virtual Digs (University of Toronto Press), articulates the need for Web archaeology as a new methodological approach to digital culture and offers a framework for the stewardship and study of Web cultural heritage.
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 Federico NanniPhD Student at the University of Bologna. | Federico Nanni's research is a methodological analysis of the issues that arise when using born digital documents, especially websites, as primary sources; his main topic is a historical study of Italian universities presence online. In particular his aim is to better understand how the processes of finding, selecting and analyzing sources change when dealing with “born-digital” ones. He is also interested in applying natural language processing and text mining techniques in his work, in order to extract information from big amounts of digital data.
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 Rainer Rubira GarcíaDoctoral candidate and teaching assistant at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid. | Rainer Rubira García's PhD research focuses on the way Internet has been built as an object of academic study in Spain within the field of Communication field for the last 15 years. The research aim to establish the possible connections between Internet studies in Communication at the European level with the ones conducted in Spain and to describe the core trends of Internet research in Communication as an academic field. This is done by analyzing the related scientific outputs in the leading European journals of the discipline during the last 15 years and by conducting in-depth interviews with selected academics.
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 Lori KendallAssociate Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. | Lori Kendall was one of the first to explore the new world of social relations as they have evolved on the Internet. Her research is mainly focused on online community and social aspects of computing. She is the author of Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub - Masculinities and Relationships Online (2002) where she examines how men and women negotiate their gender roles in an online forum and many other articles. Lori Kendall received her PhD from University of California in 1998.
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 Dr. Fiona MartinLecturer in Convergent and Online Media, Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. | Fiona Martin’s research analyses the transformation of media industries through digitalisation and internetworking. Her current focus is the political and cultural evolution of public service media and its relational turn under neo-liberalism. Her historical analyses of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and new media have explored the role of public broadcasting online and the challenges of managing dialogic interaction with users. Fiona Martin is a former ABC Radio broadcaster and producer. She received her PhD in 2008 from Southern Cross University.
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 Andra SiibakPhD, Senior Research Fellow in media studies at the Institute of Journalism and Communication at the University of Tartu, Estonia. | Andra Siibak’s present research interests include audience fragmentation new media environments, perceptions and constructions of privacy on SNS, and generations and mediation of inter-generational new media use. Her articles have appeared in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Young, Cyberpsychology, Journal of Children and Media, etc.
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 Dr. Maureen BurnsLecturer in Cultural and Media Studies, University of Queensland. | Maureen Burns’ research is focused on Public Service Broadcasting in a globalised media environment. She is the author of ABC Online: Becoming the ABC (2008) which is the first history of a public service broadcaster’s implementation of online services. Her most recent book is Public Service Broadcasters on the Web: A Comprehensive History (2011), which is co-edited together with Niels Brügger.
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 Ira WagmanAssociate Professor of Communication Studies at Carleton University, Canada. | Ira Wagman teaches and researches in the areas of cultural policy, media history, and communication theory. His recent publications include articles on online distractions in the workplace, Facebook use in Canada, and the use of photographs on Facebook. He is also the editor (with Wiill Straw and Sandra Gabriele) of Intersections of Media and Communications: Concepts and Critical Frameworks (2011) as well as an article on PowerPoint which appears in the International Journal of Communication (2011). Ira Wagman received his PhD from McGill University in 2006.
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