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.
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.
