What is social media?

A presentation on what the meaning of social media is today:

http://goo.gl/fpbK

Durian

My Second Week!

Already done with my first week of work and deep into a new research project! I've been researching and reading articles pertaining to cross-cultural deception in order to gain insight and background information for our study on international butler lies. Currently working on an annotated bibliography. Additionally I've been helping Lindsay continue to revise our research paper on our BBM butler lies study. I understand now why authors find it so difficult to rewrite things. It's hard to let go of text that you put so much time into, or get rid of our "golden babies" as Professor Hancock has called them in the past haha.

Other than that I've experienced a warm welcome from all of the other undergraduate researchers and enjoy talking over mind boggling communication questions. It's so great to bounce ideas off of each other. I've also been enjoying Ithaca over the Summer. What a different atmosphere! It's sad how fast time flies and how soon school will begin again. But for now, I'm definitely enjoying the weather!

Last week Kerwell and I finished up the last of the data collection and transcribing. This week the two of us have coded almost 30 interviews using the system we created with Professor Birnholtz. The collective gmail account we created to house all of our interview and coding data is working well. Next week I'll be helping Laura and Professor Birnholtz as they begin to write up our findings.

Beginning Coding

Last week Julia and I met with Professor Birnholtz to discuss the coding scheme for our interviews. We decided to make a shared Google account and place all of the documents online to maintain a single folder structure and bypass any sharing difficulties. We also conducted two interviews last week.

Off-the-Grid Barbershop

Whoo, what a week! This past week I was singing every day until around 3 in the morning (or later...). Why? Because it was the annual Barbershop Harmony Society's international barbershop convention!!!!!!!!!!!!

I won't talk about it too much, but if you're ever curious, good groups to look up are Crossroads and, if you're into "edgier" stuff (hahaha), Ringmasters. A group from Sweden called Swedish Match won the college competition, while the regular competition was won by a COMEDY quartet known as "Storm Front." Their gold-medal performance was absolutely hilarious, and this is the second time in the event's history that a pure comedy quartet has won.

Besides that, it's been more butler coding with Lindsay. We moved from coding "type" of butler content (i.e., is this deception dealing with entering, exiting, or arranging communication?) to coding whether or not the self-coded lies were even truly deceptive, with the specific goal to eliminate texts meant as "jokes" from inclusion in our count of lies. Now that those are done, we'll be finishing up with coding the messages for ambiguity type -- that is, whether the message is deceptive about time, location, or activity, and whether that deception is with respect to a past, present, or future occurrence.

There were also problems with some of the coding for Sally's Facebook messages, so Crystal, Sally, and I have been working through them to try to resolve ambiguities in the coding. That's a bit of a pain but it has the strong benefit of improving the coding guidelines for future projects.

Finally, work on the website for Jeff's deception book is really beginning to ramp up. Jon and Crystal have already done a lot of work on it, and soon I'll do work on a quick project involving a 1-question quiz about where deception occurs most.

Meeeaanwhile I'm super excited about swimming tomorrow -- must come up with a good drink!!

This video's of last year's international champion's at their gold-medal performance. The lyrics are a bit dated, but it's sung beeaautifully.

Hey all!

Hey everyone!

Just to briefly introduce myself: my name is Ariella and I will be starting at the lab next week! I have been in Montevideo, Uruguay for the past month studying spanish and volunteering (shameless plug for my blog here) but am really excited to begin work ( especially for the column b activities ;) ). I am a junior communication major, and took Professor Hancock's Language and Technology class this past spring, where my group did a project on Butler Lies in the context of Blackberries (I'm sure you all know what I'm referring to for the most part). On that topic however, when I was in Uruguay this past month, I was explaining to my spanish teacher the meaning of a butler lie and she goes: "Oh I do that all the time! Like I'll say, 'I ran out of money on my sym card (the popular phone payment plan in Uruguay and other nations) and couldn't open your message' even though I didn't really run out of money and actually did read it, but just didn't respond." Butler lies seem to be universal! Interesting how the actual lie differs slightly from place to place based on the different structure of the phone.

Looking forward to meeting all of you!