In recent years, Tumblr has increased dramatically in popularity and has become one of the fastest growing social networking sites. 
Recently, Tumblr hit mainstream attention when it was purchased by Yahoo! (May 2013). At this time, Tumblr contained 108.4 million blogs and reported 75.8 million posts were being created every day.
We are interested in understanding a broader set of social networking sites by learning about motivations, practices, and social interactions of Tumblr users. By exploring these findings we hope to 1) understand how people use tumblr and then use this knowledge to improve the user experience, and 2) inform new alternative methods to create successful social networking sites.
Key Publications
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Hillman, S., Procyk, J. & Neustaedter, C. (2015)
tApp: A Tumblr Analytics System
Extended Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), ACM Press, 6 pages.
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Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
“It’s More the Real Me”: The Appropriations of Tumblr by Fandoms
Proceedings of the Grace Hopper Celebration, 2 pages.
Video
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Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
alksjdf;lksfd: Tumblr and the Fandom User Experience
Proceedings of the Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, ACM Press, 10 pages.
PDF
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Hillman, S., Procyk, J., and Neustaedter, C. (2014)
Tumblr Fandoms, Community & Culture
Video Proceedings of the CSCW Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), ACM Press, 4 pages. + video
Video|PDF