Bio
Victoria Sherratt is a PhD student in the Big Data Analytics Research Group at the School of Computer Science, University of Hull. Victoria has a multidisciplinary background, with an MSc in Artificial Intelligence and an MA in Contemporary Literature and Critical Theory. Prior to undertaking a PhD, Victoria analysed social media, participatory internet culture, fringe web communities and internet content using semiotic analysis and literary theory. Her current PhD similarly focuses on analysing internet culture using a combination of scaled approaches from humanities disciplines and artificial intelligence. Alongside her PhD, Victoria is also co-founder and Director of a Manchester based data science consultancy specialising in data-driven market research.
Research interests
Victoria’s research investigates methods of interpreting social media content with a multidisciplinary application of semiotics and artificial intelligence. Her research currently focuses on analysing internet memes, which are highly referential and context-driven forms of communication. Whilst approaches like semiotics (the study of sign systems in language to create meaning) provide meaningful analyses of social content, such approaches are difficult to reproduce at scale; in contrast, many machine learning and artificial intelligence methods often struggle to evaluate content which is heavily referential or relies on cultural context. Victoria’s PhD aims to develop a computational version of semiotics using methods in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Her research also leverages domain-specific knowledge graphs and multimodal vision-language models in social media analysis. Victoria hopes her research can aid the continued analysis of social media content across other research areas, including digital policy, digital society analysis, harmful content prevention, persuasion and propaganda identification, and misinformation in digital media.