Information and Communication Technologies
This cluster studies the role and use of technologies in contexts of various groups and their information practices. Our areas of interest include, but are not limited to, technology adoption, impact, and user-centered design.
With the widespread use of information and communication technologies, important questions comprise:
- How are social relationships developed and maintained on- and offline, and what is the impact on social capital, friendship, dating, identity, and communities as a whole?
- What is the feasibility of emotion-based representation and retrieval of photographs on participatory websites?
- What can we learn from the use of language in computer-mediated contexts? In particular, how can we analyze computer-mediated discourse (e.g., blogs) for the existence and prevalence of psycho-linguistic phenomena such as emotions, certainty, trust, credibility, deception and others?
- How do we support group activities in different contexts through a socio-technical approach and participatory design methodology?
Technologies of interest include real-time communication, natural language processing, language technologies, text-mining, social software, social tagging, library technology systems, multimedia information retrieval, and data mining..
Our research encompasses a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods such as surveys, interviews, content analysis, grounded theory, ethnography, social network analysis, and nonparametric statistics of user-generated data.
Students interested in any of these topics are invited to contact the investigators directly:
Quan-Haase (LIS), Neal (LIS), Rubin (LIS), Xiao (LIS), Burkell (LIS).
[07/25/2011]