Research

Our research supports the group’s overarching goals of identifying best practices and designing virtual tools to support work activities in varied types of organizations. Current projects for the group include:

Use of Publicly Available Online Services among Knowledge Workers

Our group implements an annual national survey to understand how publicly available online services support knowledge workers in the workplace. Future work will focus on the development of techniques for using computer-use data to create visualizations for supporting reflective knowledge work, investigation and development of tools for automating the documentation of work, and evaluation of existing research on work in virtual environments.

Visualization of Reputations in Collaborative Systems

We are exploring how to leverage social translucence to make social networking sites or cooperative work projects more productive. Social translucence is a conceptual framework for thinking about how social actions in an online community facilitate future social interaction. This particular research focuses on how to visualize the different types of work present in the Wikipedia community and is geared towards creating a visualization, based on data, that will help Wikipedians recognize and value work in the Wikipedia community.

Linguistic Cues of Roles in Conversational Exchanges (LiCORICE)

As part of an interdisciplinary team of linguists, engineers and social scientists, we identify linguistic and rhetorical cues in online discourse that correlate with social moves of consensus and control. Currently, we are exploring the way Wikipedia users make claims of expertise and authority on talk pages.