Cardiff School of Social Sciences

I am a founding member of the Collaborative Online Social Media ObServatory (COSMOS) (£460K from ESRC and JISC), and am currently involved in nine ongoing research projects including as Principal Investigator: 'Social Media and Prediction: Crime Sensing, Data Integration and Statistical Modelling' (ESRC); ‘Digital Social Research Tools, Tension Indicators and Safer Communities: A demonstration of COSMOS’ (ESRC); The ‘All Wales Hate Crime Project’ (Big Lottery Fund, UK); the 'e-Crime Reduction Partnership Mapping Study' (Nominet Trust); as co-investigator: 'Hate Speech and Social Media: Understanding Users, Networks and Information Flows' (ESRC/Google); 'Identifying and Modelling Victim, Business, Regulatory and Malware Behaviours in a Changing Cyberthreat Landscape' (EPSRC); ‘Supporting Empirical Social Science Research with a Virtual Research Environment’ (JISC);  ‘Requirements Analysis for Social Media Analysis Research Tools’ (ESRC); and 'Perpetrators of Hate Crime' (Welsh Government). 

I was also co-investigator on the ESRC projects ‘Ethnography for the Digital Age’ and ‘Methods and Issues in Qualitative Online Data Sharing and Archiving’.  

Interdisciplinarity is a key feature of my research and I have worked with members of staff in the schools of Computer Science, Psychology, Law, Business, Mathematics and Dentistry. I have been successful in gaining grants from the ESRC, EPSRC, AHRC, JISC, Big Lottery Fund, Welsh Government, Nominet Trust, Stonewall Cymru, TUC Wales, Safer Wales and the Department of Health.  My research income to date is in excess of £2.5M.    

I am co-editor (with Malcolm Williams, William Housley and Adam Edwards) of the special issue of the International Journal of Social Research Methodology entitled Computational Social Science: Research Strategies, Design and Methods (2013), of the special issue (with David Wall) of Policing and Society entitled: Policing Cybercrime: Networked and Social Media Technologies and the Challenges for Policing, and the forthcoming book Digital Society: Theory, Method and Data (with Adam Edwards, William Housley and Peter Burnap) that will be published by Sage in 2015.  My book, Virtually Criminal published by Routledge was short listed for the British Sociological Association’s Philip Abrams Memorial Book Prize in 2007. 

I have published in the areas of Cybercrime, Cybersecurity. Digital Social Research Methodology and Sexuality and Criminal Justice and have presented at over 50 national and international conferences. I am a member of HM Government UK Cybercrime Reduction Partnership, an academic reviewer on HM Government Office for Science Foresight project ‘Future of Identity’, an academic advisor to the ACPO/College of Policing project ‘National Assessment on threats and opportunities posed by the use of Global Digital Communication Technologies’, and was academic advisor to the DTI foresight programme and the eCrime Wales Project.   

I was recently appointed to serve as a member of the ESRC's Peer Review College.