Me and my son, Aidan.
Current Projects
Publications
The rest of my world (family, etc)
Vita
Contact Me
Return to my Home Page

 

I completed my undergraduate work at Earlham College, culminating in my senior thesis on the interplay between second language use and ethnic identification. I am now pursuing a Master’s in Rhetoric while working as a research associate in the HCII. The common thread between these two worlds is a fascination with how people communicate, especially in situations where the fluidity of the interaction is distrupted, whether by different languages, different discourses or different locations. I am interested in the role technology plays in communication, and the role natural communication plays in shaping emerging technology.

Current Projects

Gestures Project
Susan R. Fussell
Jie Yang
Jane Siegel

Gesture is one important component of colocated communication. This project seeks to understand the role of gesture in communication by people collaborating on a physical task, with the goal of developing and testing tools to support this role among collaborators who are not colocated. I am involved in the design and execution of laboratory experiments for this project.


Shared Visual Spaces
Robert Kraut
Susan R. Fussell
Jane Siegel
Jie Yang
Susan E. Brennan, SUNY Stony Brook

Being in the same place improves collaborative work. The primary goals of our research are to understand how a shared visual spaces influences collaboration, to discover how the usefulness of visual information interacts with tasks, and to identify ways to build communication systems for remote collaborative work. I have been involved with this project since starting at Carnegie Mellon University, and have participated in planning, executing and coordinating data from several phases of experiments related to this research.


Multidisciplinary Collaboration
Sara Kiesler
Pamela Hinds, Stanford University
Suzanne P. Weisband, U. of Arizona

This project uses social science methods to better understand the requirements for successful multidisciplinary collaborations, the fundamental processes associated with geographic and functional distance, and applications that could reduce geographic and functional distance and improve conditions for successful multidisciplinary collaborations. I have been involved on several phases of this project, from discourse analysis of fieldwork transcripts to experimental design and execution of laboratory experiments.

Communication and social interaction in a long term chat community
Susan R. Fussell

This project seeks to develop alternative methods for assessing chatroom participants’ mental and physical well-being, based on the content and structure of their discourse over a period of time, within an established online community. Our goal is to provide a tool that can be used for the assessment of a wide range of mental and physical disorders within various communication technologies. The resulting coding system will then be made freely available in the interest of supporting and improving upon online communities as a resource for those suffering from mental or physical ailments. I performed preliminary analysis of discourse related to this study for a class project, and will continue involvement in the collection and analysis of this data.