Research
I study the building of bridges, wikis in organizations, and interventions with newly hired employees in order to understand how distributed work gets done and how social computing technologies are engaged in that work. My research focuses on studying socio-technical systems using grounded theory and actor-network theory methods with an eye towards improving our theories of distributed work and social computing. While I am interested in the design implications my findings may have for socio-technical systems, such implications are not my primary focus. I aim to contribute new ways of thinking about distributed work and the roles of social computing in its accomplishment.
Below are some interesting tidbits about research projects I’m currently on or worked on in the past. To read more about current projects, try the posts tagged “research” here on my blog. You can also download and read my latest research statement.
My Dissertation
Building Bridges
My dissertation research has two main goals:
- provide a detailed description of the work done in order to build a novel bridge, and
- outline a substantive theory of collaboration among professionals.
In plain English, I’m studying a series of collaborations that produced a bridge in Michigan. Part of the bridge is made out of a new kind of concrete, and my study describes the development of that material and the variety of people and their work who came together to get the bridge built. Building the bridge required members of an academic research lab, a state transportation department, and several construction contracting companies to work together. My dissertation will be descriptive in nature; I’ll tell the story of the bridge getting built. I focus on actors and work. Loosely, I define actors as things that produce change or require response. That definition includes humans (e.g. bridge designers) and non-humans (e.g. the new concrete). Work, also loosely, is about effort and association. Work is the “stuff” done by the actors, whether its describing a process (e.g. design document) or pouring concrete (e.g. construction worker).
I’ve chosen this route in my dissertation work because I think we too often begin from theoretical frameworks. Those frameworks come with blinders that we wear, usually unrelflexively, and limit what phenomena we see. I’m not the only one with this idea; I rely heavily on Bruno Latour, Anselm Strauss, Barney Glaser, Jean Lave, and John Seeley Brown.
My Internship
Human Interactions in Programming
This summer I’ll be working with Andy Begel in the Human Interactions in Programming group at Microsoft Research. We’re doing a qualitative study with the aim of easing the onboarding of newly hired developers.
Additional Current Projects
Wikis in Organizations
This is a new set of projects exploring the use of wikis by exisiting physical organizations. The first publication to come from the project is a note Jude Yew and I wrote for the GROUP Conference. I’ll be presenting there in November. We’re currently planning the next stages of the KNOW SI study (of the School of Infomation wiki) and possibilities for other wikis to study.
Click here to read our GROUP paper
Using Cyberinfrastructure to Develop Next Generation Civil Infrastructure
One of NSF’s CI-TEAM grants, this study is a collaboration between School of Information faculty (and me) and faculty and students from the College of Engineering. We’ll be exploring how to move a new material (engineering cementious composites - a.k.a. bendable concrete) into building code and eventually into construction practice. To do so, we need to understand how best to test the material to meet U.S. standards for building material, how to transfer the practices of making and working with the composites from lab to field, how to encourage diffusion of innovations in communities of practice, and few more things we haven’t thought about yet.
Click here to see the project’s abstract from NSF’s site
Past Projects
Poetry in Motion
The Poetry in Motion study was a pilot project for my Visuospatial Cognition class, and I conducted a web-based experiment to compare a static view of a poem with an animated version of the same poem to see whether the animated version engaged readers differently. This fall I’ll be running a full scale version of that experiment; I adjusted it based on qualitative research I conducted in undergrad English classrooms last spring.
Click here for a brief poster proposal about the experiment project
RideNow
Research in the RideNow project focuses on how to motivate participation and reduce coordination costs in ad hoc ride sharing services, as well as the scalability, extensibility, and privacy implications of different system architectures. I am especially interested in the effects of ride sharing on social capital and the development of community.
Click here to read our GROUP paper (367KB - PDF)
Click here to visit RideNow’s web home
MessagePlus
In MessagePlus, we’re examining what, if any, context can help people make sense of messages in email lists. When people look for content in email lists like Usenet, they often begin by searching. Search results return one message without context, and our experiments compare two interfaces for positiong messages within their thread context. We submitted a paper to CHI 2007 about our experiments and the subsequent work at slashDOT that they informed.
GLRCE
The Great Lakes Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases Research is an NIH/NIAID funded center. My colleagues and I provided the communications core for the center - developing intranet-like websites, public websites, and private websites for the Public Health Officials Network. We researched the use of technology and its role in the development and maintenance of collaborations within the center.
Click here for the poster we presented at the annual meeting in 2005. (1.9MB - PDF)
