image courtesy of the Illinois state highway system. thanks!

I recently completed a project examining differences between rural and urban MySpace users. Currently, I have a paper in submission. ssh. This is really just a placeholder for that paper once it’s published (somewhere). I took an quantitative approach, and found the following: rural users have much smaller networks much closer to home, rural users value privacy more and women represent a much greater proportion of rural users. I will write more once the paper comes out.

screenshot of remodeled list of feeds

Google Reader is one of my favorite apps. My biggest complaint, however, is the waste of space in the list of feeds on the left side of the interface. This summer I toyed around with a Greasemonkey script that transforms the interface into a tag cloud. It’s not perfect, but I use it day to day. To use: install GreaseMonkey, then install the script (you only need to click the link — GreaseMonkey takes care of the rest).

CodeSaw: A Social Visualization of Distributed Software Development, Interact 2007

Abstract
We present CodeSaw, a social visualization of distributed software development. CodeSaw visualizes a distributed software community from two important and independent perspectives: code repositories and project communication. By bringing together both shared artifacts (code) and the talk surrounding those artifacts (project mail), CodeSaw reveals group dynamics that lie buried in existing technologies. This paper describes the visualization and its design process. We apply CodeSaw to a popular open source project, showing how the visualization reveals group dynamics and individual roles. The paper ends with a discussion of the results of an online field study with prominent open source developers. The field study suggests that CodeSaw positively affects communities and provides incentives to distributed developers. Furthermore, an important design lesson from the field study leads us to introduce a novel interaction technique for social visualization called spatial messaging.

Full paper as PDF

I decided to redesign my site (old version) into a blog format, in the hope that I will find more joy in updating it regularly. I will post published papers here, as well as ongoing research prototypes and unfinished analyses. Perhaps I will even become more of a public academic.

I have not completely filled-in the site yet. I plan to do it gradually as I adjust to periodic updates.