Welcome to our lab
Our mission
we’re leading the charge to safeguard the public by countering the exploitation of data voids with proactive, high-integrity solutions.
In a world where misinformation rapidly spreads across platforms, SPILL combats the dangers posed by data voids, which threaten the integrity of information in critical areas like healthcare, finance, technology, and education.
SPILL's mission is to empower users with tools to detect and counter misinformation, provide educational resources to enhance global information security, and ensure that accurate, reliable content prevails across digital landscapes.
WE WANT THE WORLD TO UNDERSTAND THAT WHAT WE SEARCH MATTERS, HOW WE PROTECT SEARCH INTEGRITY MATTERS, AND THAT WE CAN SECURE A MORE INFORMED FUTURE.
The Story of SPILL
Our goal is simple:
To improve Search Literacy
For over a decade, Dr. Tripodi has dedicated her research agenda to issues of information access and integrity. Specifically, her research has examined how people navigate the vast online landscape of news and information to identify reliable sources. In doing so, she has documented the significant threat data voids play in our information environment and developed search literacy tools to help enable strong information seeking skills.
In 2024, The Search Prompt Integrity & Learning Lab (SPILL) was founded with the objective of providing tools and knowledge to tackle misinformation before unleashing its harmful consequences. What if we could identify misinformation when it is being created? To answer this question, SPILL combines technological and humanistic approaches with an interdisciplinary team of collaborators.
systematically identifying and addressing data voids
detect
Create a system for detecting data voids proactively by partnering with researchers
Develop
Develop a dashboard of results to provide journalists, educators, programmers, and Wikipedians with information on phrases tied to incomplete or inaccurate information
Design
Design educational interventions to help everyday citizens improve their search literacy
THE TEAM
Meet
Pablo Aragón, Advisor
Pablo Aragón is a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he focuses on knowledge integrity and resilience to disinformation in Wikipedia and its sister projects. He is interested in computational social science and social computing through interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to enhance collaboration and deliberation in online platforms.
Patrick Gildersleve, Researcher Collaborator
Patrick is a Fellow in Computational Social Science in the Department of Methodology, London School of Economics and Political Science. Patrick completed his PhD at the Oxford Internet Institute in 2021 where he studied the recording and reaction to current events on Wikipedia and its relationship with news media. In his research he employs and develops techniques from network science, text analysis, time series analysis, and machine learning. Through his research, Patrick strives to understand the social, editorial, and algorithmic processes that shape collective attention and drive interest towards news and current events.
Anna Beers, Post-Doctoral Fellow
Anna Beers is a postdoctoral researcher at SPILL. She uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze data voids and other phenomena on Wikipedia, and also coordinates several projects visualizing and analyzing political communities online. She graduated with her PhD in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington, where she researched social media influencers and their implications for misinformation and hateful rhetoric.
Agustín Orozco, Undergraduate Researcher
Agustin Orozco is a research assistant at UNC Chapel Hill, where he is pursuing a B.S. in Psychology and a B.A. in Data Science. He is interested in how algorithms are harming marginalized communities in tangible and intangible ways, specifically looking at predictive models and search engines. Currently, his research focuses on how models reinforce narratives that systematically oppress marginalized people. He is examining cases of predictive policing in the United States, as well as, the conceptualizations that these models create based on the communities they’re implemented in.
Francesca Tripodi, Founder
Dr. Francesca Tripodi is sociologist and information scholar. She is currently an Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2023, Dr. Tripodi received the Award for Impact and Excellence from the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington in recognition of her research on fostering an informed society and was featured on NBC Meet the Press Reports on the dangers of PragerU in higher education. Her research has been covered in the United States by NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, Slate as well as other prestigious international publications (e.g., BBC, the Financial Times, Sábado, Libération).
Viviane Ito, PhD Student
Viviane Ito is a PhD student in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research interests are disinformation, misinformation, and gender bias within information and language. In the past, she developed research on women's experiences with chronic pain at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and on gender biases in Olympic athletes' discourses at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
