Profile

Yin is fascinated by the intersection between language and technology. She researches persuasion in the context of new media, focusing specifically on the rhetoric and resonance of Brexit tweets. Her multi-strategy design encompasses qualitative text analysis, multivariate regressions, outlier detection and analysis, semi-structured trace interviews, supervised machine learning algorithms, and natural language processing. What makes a political message resonate with its audience on social media? How can the message be expressed and delivered most effectively? What strategies do individuals and organisations use when they send a political tweet and why?

Prior to joining the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and Balliol College, Yin obtained a Masters in English Language from the University of Oxford (Lincoln College) in 2014 and a Bachelor of Arts from Columbia University (magna cum laude) in 2012, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Between these degrees, she worked at Pearson’s Higher Education division and 10 Speed Labs, a digital media agency in Manhattan. While at Columbia, she was a research annotator at the Centre for Computational Learning Systems and the editor in chief of Inside New York 2011, a nationally-published guidebook to New York City.

Yin has been very active at the Oxford Internet Institute. She is currently the teaching assistant for the Natural Language Processing option course for the MSc in Social Data Science and the Accessing Research Data from the Social Web option course for the MSc in Social Science of the Internet. She was a lead organiser of the Connected Life 2015 conference, the teaching assistant for the Statistics Core requirement for all MSc and DPhil students, and a DPhil Student Representative on the Graduate Studies Committee. She has also been involved with three research projects with OII faculty, one of which was based at the Alan Turing Institute. In spring 2018, she visited the Information Visualisation and Visual Analytics unit of the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD under an EU SoBigData grant to develop and visualise natural language processing approaches to her dataset of 26 million Brexit tweets.

Outside of the OII, Yin has served as the Senior Community Warden at the Student Union, a tutor for the Seminar for Advanced English Studies, a city tour guide, and a digital consultant. She has sung both soprano and alto for Balliol, Wadham, Christ Church, and Pembroke College chapel choirs. A Clarendon Scholar, Yin served on the Clarendon Council in 2015 and was editor in chief of the Clarendon Chronicle. In March 2016 and 2017, she helped deliver empowerment programmes at six different secondary schools across Japan. At Balliol, she was a Peer Supporter and served as a Warden of the Jowett Walk complex. She was also a member of the 2016-2017 Oxford Global Leadership Initiative learning community.

Yin defines herself as a creator, communicator, and connector. She is the founder and co-convenor of the #SocialHumanities network at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH). Previously, her passion for networking and event management led her to launch the Lexicography Society at Columbia and an English Language Seminar at Lincoln College. She also created a video series for the Lexicography Society, What’s Your Word? Yin’s eclectic interests span experimental writing, startups and entrepreneurship, piano, singing, SEO/SEM, transcontinental cooking, bread baking, mixology, travel, learning languages, hiking, photography, and video production. Her ultimate objective is to reinvent the novel—along with the very acts of reading and writing—through new media technologies.

Yin is grateful to the Oxford University Press Clarendon Fund and Santander for full funding support.

Research interests

social media, online communication, natural language processing, interactive visualisation, discourse analysis, digital rhetoric, sociology of culture, pragmatics, social tagging, Internet linguistics, corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, big data, digital marketing, search engine optimisation, sentiment analysis, social network analysis, media studies

Positions held at the OII

  • DPhil Candidate, October 2014 –

Supervisors at the OII

Past projects

  • Data Financing for Global Good: A Feasibility Study

    Participants: Professor Vili Lehdonvirta, Dr Brent Mittelstadt, Dr Greg Taylor, Yin Yin Lu, Artem Kadikov, Professor Helen Margetts

    This project, and the resulting report, provides a first step in the assessment of data financing as a mechanism for social good in the data economy.

Online articles

Reports

Reviews

Videos

  • Russian Tweets on Brexit

    Recorded: 14 November 2017

    Duration: 00:03:26

    A detailed analysis of Twitter accounts identified by the US senate as being linked to the Kremlin shows this activity before, during and after the Brexit vote in 2016.

  • Language and Empowerment

    Recorded: 19 January 2017

    Duration: 00:10:09

    Yin Yin Lu, DPhil Candidate at Balliol College, University of Oxford speaks on Language and Empowerment at the UK launch of T-Talks. She shares some of her PhD research on Brexit hashtags and expresses her love and language and words.

Press