Hi, I'm Nina

I study how visual media in problematic information (online hate, misinformation, scams) targets and/or denigrates individuals in vulerable, high-stakes situations (i.e. elections, betting, scams) or crises (migration, homelessness). I dig through a lot of the internet's odder (and sometimes problematic) visual content to inform ways that we can make the internet safer and less toxic. I often end up creating new methods, tools, and workflows during this, which I try to share so other researchers can safely and rigorously study the visual world.

I am a second year PhD student at the University of Washington in Human Centered Design and Engineering and the Center for an Informed Public. I am advised by Dr. Kate Starbird and graciously supported by an NSF and Herbold Fellowship.

Currently, I am working on analyzing visual tactics and rumors of what we found during our work on the US 2024 Presidential Election, developing visual research pipelines, analyzing anti-immigrant rhetoric, and thinking about the role of religion and prediction in online sensemaking. You can find me on email, X, or LinkedIn!

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About Me where I've been
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My Research what I do and think about
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Publications/Press words I've written or about me
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Fun/Other other interwebs

NEWS
April Happy to have received 2 recognitions for outstanding reviews for CHI 2025 and CSCW 2025 cycles!
March I will be at Microsoft Research this summer as an intern, focusing on religious liberties and problematic information.
February Paper (the first focused on my anti-immigrant propaganda work) conditionally accepted to CSCW 2025!
January I will be at CHI as an author on a great paper! Preprint soon!
November I am at CSCW in Costa Rica! I am presenting my paper on Latinidad and Tiktok along with a poster of a visual method.
October My co-author Sourojit Ghosh presented our paper at AIES while I was tracking election rumors here at UW!
September I will be at Trust and Safety presenting two posters, one about recent visual pipeline methods I have been developing at UW.
July Excited to be on a research panel at the ICPSR Summer Workshop on the Meta Content Library!
July Thrilled to be named a Herbold fellow at the University of Washington!
June Presented art at CVPR in Seattle, WA