I am an information scientist working at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Köln (Cologne),  Department Compuational Social Science. At GESIS, I’m responsible for new approaches to using social media in social science research. I am am one of two inaugural Digital Studies fellows at the Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Center.Until 2012 I worked at the Department of Information Science at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. Within the fields of information science and web science my research focus is on social media, social semantic web, informetrics & altmetrics, web users and communication structures. In my current research projects, I am mainly studying Twitter communication in different contexts.
My PhD thesis was about combining Social and Semantic Web strategies for knowledge representation. Before my PhD, I completed a Magistra Artium degree in History, Media Studies and Information Science in 2005.I have regularly given classes in information science at HHU Düsseldorf and enjoy working in interdisciplinary research teams. Furthermore, I am co-author of a monthly column on social media trends for the German trade journal Password.

on the web

@kwelle on Twitter
Slideshare  • mendeley • Google Scholar

+ my website at GESIS
+ my former website at Heinrich-Heine-University, Dept. of Information Science

news

Some of my current activities:

• I’ll be teaching this class on “Social Media as a Source for Research Data” organized by NCRM, University of Southampton (July 27-28). (See course material here).
• We’ll organize the 3rd Computational Social Science Winter Symposium (#cssws16) in Cologne, Nov 29 – Dec 1, 2016.
• Short paper with Axel Bruns presented at Web Science Conference 2016: Twitter as a First Draft of the Present – and the Challenges of Preserving It for the Future. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908174 (view authors’ version: WebSci16_Bruns+Weller, view slides).
• Short paper with Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda at Web Science Conference 2016: A Manifesto for Data Sharing in Social Media Research. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2908131.2908172 (view slides: WebSci16_Weller+Kinder)
• GESIS is hosting ICWSM-16 in Cologne.
• My new viewpoint article on Online Information Review: “Trying to understand social media users and usage: The forgotten features of social media platforms”, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-09-2015-0299
• #Microposts 2016 Workshop was held at WWW Conference.
• I’ve been interviewed by the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center on “preserving social media for future historians” (which was re-posted on Time.com), by Politico and by Inside Higher Ed.
• Videoand slides from my 2015 lecture at the Library of Congress, organized by the John W. Kluge Center: “The digital traces of user generated content. How social media data may become the historical sources of the future.”
• Report at LSE Impact blog from our workshop at Web Science Conference 2015: Quantifying and Analysing Scholarly Communication on the Web (ASCW’15): What can bibliometrics do for you? What can you do for bibliometrics? Co-organized with Peter Kraker, Elisabeth Lex and Isabella Peters. Oxford, UK, June 30th 2015.