She studies educational possibilities of social media as well as crisis informatics. Her research sits at the intersection of computer science and social science and falls within the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Using a combination of empirical methods, including qualitative, computational and network analysis, Starbird examines both small group and large scale interaction online within the context of disasters and other mass disruption events, studying how digital volunteers and other members of the crowd work to filter and shape the information space. One of the shooting events Starbird documented was the attack at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. In another research project, her analysis of a dataset of 600,000 tweets about the "Deepwater Horizon" oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico helped to put together a map of how information was shared among those close to the event and more broadly.