About Me

Social media has some very real toxicity challenges, like harassment and cyberbullying, that diminish its utility for collective and democratic efforts, and I study human-AI content moderation to address those challenges.

I also study data curation, especially how we evaluate (a) the impacts of data reuse and (b) investments in curating and disseminating research data.

I have a few titles at the University of Michigan:

• Associate Professor, School of Information
• Research Associate Professor, Institute for Social Research

• Associate Professor, Digital Studies Institute, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

• Director, Resource Center for Minority Data, ICPSR
• Director, Social Media Archive, ICPSR

Work with Me

Thank you for your interest! I am not recruiting students or postdocs right now (or to start in Fall 2026).

Publications

Here’s a PDF of my CV and some recent publications:

Data Curation and Archiving

• Hemphill, L., Schöpke-Gonzalez, A., & Panda, A. (2022). Comparative sensitivity of social media data and their acceptable use in research. Scientific Data, 9(1), 643. doi: 10.1038/s41597-022-01773-w
• Lafia, S., Fan, L., Thomer, A.K., and Hemphill, L. (2022) Subdivisions and Crossroads: Identifying Hidden Community Structures in a Data Archive’s Citation Network. Quantitative Science Studies. doi: 10.1162/qss_a_00209.
• Thomer, A. K., Akmon, D., York, J., Tyler, A. R. B., Polasak, F., Lafia, S., Hemphill, L., & Yakel, E. (2022). The craft and coordination of data curation: complicating “workflow” views of data science. Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (PACM HCI). doi: 10.7302/4017.

Social Media, Content Moderation, and Extremism

• Li, L., Fan, L., Atreja, S., & Hemphill, L. (2024). “HOT” ChatGPT: The Promise of ChatGPT in Detecting and Discriminating Hateful, Offensive, and Toxic Comments on Social Media. ACM Transactions on the Web. 18(2), 1-36. doi: 10.1145/3643829
• Schöpke-Gonzalez, A., Wu, S., Kumar, S., & Hemphill, L. (2025). Using off-the-shelf harmful content detection models: Best practices for model reuse. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(2), 1–27. doi: 10.1145/3711099
• Schöpke-Gonzalez, A., Atreja, S., Shin, H. N., Ahmed, N., & Hemphill, L. (2022). Why do volunteer content moderators quit? Burnout, conflict, and harmful behaviors. New Media & Society. doi: 10.1177/14614448221138

Generative AI and Social Science

• Atreja, S., Ashkinaze, J., Li, L., Mendelsohn, J., and Hemphill, L. (2025) What’s in a Prompt?: A Large-Scale Experiment to Assess the Impact of Prompt Design on the Compliance and Accuracy of LLM-generated Text Annotations. 19th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2025). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35807
• Xian, L., Li, L., Xu, Y., Zhang, B. Z., & Hemphill, L. (2024). Landscape of Generative AI in Global News: Topics, Sentiments, and Spatiotemporal Analysis. 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2024). doi: 10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31416
• Fan, L., Li, L., Ma, Z., Lee, S., Yu, H., & Hemphill, L. (2024). A Bibliometric Review of Large Language Models Research from 2017 to 2023. Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology. doi: 10.1145/3664930