Research Projects

photo by Chad Driesbach

I'm currently involved in two ongoing, grant-funded research projects. Both projects center around online collaboration. The LiCORICE project combines research from human-computer interaction, machine learning,liguistics and natural language processing to detect the underlying social dynamics of online discourse. The Engage project is involved in creating better communication and crowdsourcing tools for encouraging public deliberation online.


LiCORICE: Linguistic Cues of Roles in Conversational Exchanges

As part of an interdisciplinary team of 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 establish credibility and express interpersonal alignment on in talk page discussions.

 

Engage: Online Deliberation and Public Engagement

This project is a collaboration among faculty and students in the departments of Communication, Computer Science and Human Centered Design. It is funded by NSF grant #0966929, "Socio-Computational Systems to Support Public Engagement and Deliberation." Our purpose is to investigate the design, implementation, deployment, and testing of innovative ways for citizens and government to communicate. The overall aim is to achieve measurable improvements in citizen engagement, participation, and deliberation, and to enable public officials to gain insight from always-available and readily interpretable citizen input. To test our ideas, we have the enthusiastic participation of the Seattle City Club, a non-partisan, nonprofit education organization dedicated to informing citizens and building community leadership in the greater Seattle area.