ting. Sorry I missed this past meeting, my meeting with Poppy went past 3. See ya next week!

act and working with the typicality of groups with Greek organizations. Which the results are pretty interesting. I will have to share those the next mee

d up for the blogging through text message...(Shaking my head) I know...I'm a lost cause....welll anywho, this past week I been concentrating on my abstr

Hello Everyone! So I somehow forgot my email address to sign in so I had to make another profile but after I made my new profile, I remember that I signe

Faeries!

Hey everyone!
I went to the NYS Faerie festival this weekend and it was AWESOME!! What is better than dressing up and pretending you are a faerie all day....???

Anyway, when I was checking over the coding work I did for Sally, I noticed some inconsistencies that caused us to rethink things and become quite confused as to the differences between certain cognitive and emotional self disclosures in Facebook status updates. I think we are going to ask everyone in the group at next week's meeting what their opinions are on the issue... so basically I had to go back and look over ALL of the data, which took quite a while.

I have Jeff's smile experiment set up on one of the lab computers, and need people to smile for me! If you are free at all this week, come into the lab and be a part of the experiment! (It literally takes 2 minutes, tops).

Now that I have created a list of deception books for Jeff to buy, we need to write the Market/Competition part of his book proposal!

Well.... off to writing!


Crystal

Conducting Interviews

Last week Julia and I successfully conducted two interviews on campus. The interviewees couldn't have had more different things to say about distributed collaborations. One seemed to have the process down pat and had multiple successful collaborations; the other found it immensely frustrating to even initiate collaborations. All in all I think we've gathered some good data for the study.

Other than that, I've transcribed more interviews and am finishing up the anonymizations of existing interviews. Also, the potluck was delicious!

In other random news, it's 83% humid outside. Walking up West Campus and then the Slope was not fun this morning.

Handy exam trick: when you know the answer but not the correct derivation, derive blindly forward from the givens and backward from the answer, and join the chains once the equations start looking similar. Sometimes the graders don't notice the seam.

Getting Ready

Unfortunately, we never managed to salvage the corrupted video data files but we found another way to use the chat data without the videos for our research. Also, we finally began data coding! We also got another coder, Jessica on board and as a result, we've been trying to compare our coding styles in order to improve the synchronization rate. We also managed to further improve our coding scheme and we hope that by the end of this week, we'll have most of the data coded and ready for statistical analysis.

Dancing Baby Doing The Samba In Brazil - geekdrop.com

Ok, so I am looking up funny videos to get people to smile... watch this and tell me if its good! and if you have any funny videos, please post them!!!

Happy Tuesday morning!

(even though I was supposed to post this entry yesterday!)

I'm still basically working on the same stuff: books for Jeff and still trying to finish Sally's coding. Kayaking on Thursday was awesome! All of you party poopers who didn't come should definitely start coming to the Thursday activities... or if you can't make Thursday, think of another day and other cool things to do!

Hope everyone has a great week! :)

another week!

Hey all,

This past week I've been working on collecting top cited/most read articles and books for the Oxford Bibliography Online. I have over 200 articles related to CMC now! I have a couple more searches to do and then I am going to start writing 2-3 sentence descriptions for a few of the books.

Later today, the undergrads in the lab and I are attending this event about "How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies":

http://www.cornell.edu/events/profile.cfm?id=35447

It should be interesting! I also had a lot of fun kayaking and I am looking forward to the next activity (I might not be able to attend this week's activity, as I am going away for the weekend).

Kayaking and More

Since my last post, it's been all about butler lies. I've been coding away with Jin and Lindsay and making good progress on fleshing out definitions and guidelines. For those who don't know, a "butler lie" is any type of lie you'd use to excuse yourself from a situation -- e.g., "sorry I just got your text!" even if you'd seen it hours ago, or "g2g feed the dog" if you just want that annoying IM beast to leave you alone.

On the side, I finished up compiling the master excel spreadsheet of Facebook status updates for Sally, although we're still waiting on those final Spanish translations. I'll be continuing work on butler lies for the next couple weeks, but it sounds like I'll be starting to get more involved with the deception book website for Jeff. We're meeting tomorrow, so we'll see how that goes.

My votes for future activities definitely include rollerskating and bowling, but I'm especially excited for the bonfire and swimming somewhere. I think go-karts would also be fun, but I think it could be a little expensive (less than kayaks, but without the awesomeness of being on Cayuga).

Big question from this week: What should even be coded as a deceptive message? People self-code messages as deceptive much more often than they "should," often labeling messages such "lol" as deceptive because "I wasn't actually laughing," even though no one would expect that they actually laughed out loud from such a message. There are a lot of fine lines, especially regarded messages meant as manipulative but not necessarily deceptive, per se. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out this semantic jumble!!!

Next week is the week I'll be away =( But the good news is, it's for the international BARBERSHOP COMPETITION!!! Yessssss. Here's a video of my quartet doing the songs from our set:

Moving Along

Last week I transcribed a few more interviews and started anonymizing existing transcripts in preparation for the writing of the paper abstract. I've also contacted everyone on our list in Ithaca and have gotten a decent number of responses so far. The first interview is scheduled for this Wednesday.

I also attended the Basic Data Analysis workshop on Monday and Tuesday, which was helpful in introducing us to data collection and organization. I also shadowed Laura Forlano, a postdoc based in Mahnattan, as she interviewed Dr. Katherine McComas.

Also, I went kayaking with the lab on Thursday and had a blast!

June 21

This is my first blog! And I am pretty excited. This past week, has been a great learning experience in so many areas. The research I am conducting in the social sciences, is going really well. I just finished writing my very first ROUGH draft and am continuing to expand as the day goes by. My research is about how different social groups interact with one another. More specifically, how Greek organizations, Caucasian and African-Americans fraternities and sororities, interact with one another. I am also discovering how these Greek organizations are perceived by the general college public and ways each organization is governed. So far, I am LOVING my research.
Also this past week I went Kayaking! There's always a first time for everything. And this was mine. Poppy went with me; which I'm not surprised since she is so great. The next morning my arms felt like dead weight, BUT thats okay since I had so much fun. Also, I spent this past weekend visiting my Uncle in Jersey and he took to New York City (First time too)! So overall, I am very content in how my summer is shaping.

Not much difference

Not much difference in terms of what we did last week compared to the week before. We are still analyzing the audio chat data with the video game videos and while we had some trouble with syncing the audio chat data with the screen caps, we managed to come through and are continuing to analyze more data. Now the only problem is that there are quite a few video files that are "corrupt" and cannot be played. We are still looking into solutions and hope the data can be salvaged.

For this week, we are planning to start coding the data using the coding scheme that we created and hopefully finish analyzing all the chat data as well.

On Monday and Tuesday I attended the data analysis workshop and tracked down data I was missing from the survey data spreadsheets. Laura (a post doc based working with us on this project) was here from Manhattan; Kerwell and I sat in on her interview with Katerine McComas on Tuesday. I transcribed that interview and I met with Laura again on Wednesday to talk about further steps. Currently I’m working on a list of possible terms/themes for coding the interview data.

Professor Hancock asked to plan this week’s “column B” activity after I suggested we switch up the times a little bit. Those of us in the lab this morning realized we didn’t have an afternoon this week where the majority of us could get together so someone suggested we get lunch instead. We’re planning on heading over to Synapses (the “new” café in the biotech building across the street) around noon on Thursday; hope you can join us!

more ideas for those "column B" activities...

beach volleyball @ the north campus outdoor volleyball courts, trips to local parks (buttermilk, taughannock falls, robert treman), bowling, billiards, roller skating?

With apologies to the Ph.D. candidates...

Weekly Update!

I also just attended the Basic Analysis Workshop! It was a good introduction to statistics, especially because I will be taking stats and research methods in the fall.

This past Saturday I presented the poster I made about online dating deception. Overall, I think the alumni event went really well! It was interesting to meet Communication alumni, as many told me how much the major has changed (there used to be journalism requirements, etc.).

Now that the poster is done, I am focusing on gathering articles and textbooks related to computer-mediated communication for a future online Oxford Bibliography that Professor Hancock was invited to contribute to. Right now, I will start by finding the most cited and relevant articles, which Professor Hancock and Catalina will narrow down to what they think are the most important and organize what I find into more specific categories.

Should be a good week! :)

Hey All!

A couple of the other undergrads and I just got back from a data analysis workshop. If you were there (or would have liked to have been) you can access my notes via Google docs here.

Last week I continued transcribing interviews and began to analyze them. The importance of trust resonates through the interviews and this trust tends to be fostered by two factors: collaborator expertise and collaborator commitment. Technology appears to impede two other important collaborative components that participants identified: spontaneous interaction and the ability to see the project’s “big picture.” It’s not surprising that one of the biggest themes is the importance of face-to-face interaction, especially during the beginning stages on a project.

I’ve also continued to update and improve the spreadsheets containing the survey data we have from four surveys conducted over two collaborator retreats.

I was bummed that I couldn’t make our “column B” activity on Thursday. While walking home on Thursday I realized that the rather abstract moniker we’ve given our lab excursions supports an observation Wegner makes in his chapter on transactive memory. Wegner describes the transactive encoding of group information, writing that “whatever label is applied first, perhaps arbitrarily, becomes the catchword for the item…individuals are more inclined to remember items as discussed than items as perceived.”

call for ideas!

Hi everyone,

For my post this week I'm going to pose a question in hopes that some (or all!) of you respond with ideas.

Jeff & I are in the process of creating a list of objectives for the lab. Since many undergraduates spend a large portion of their semesters doing research in this space, we'd like to have a concrete list of tools, theories & knowledge that alumni of the lab can walk away with. Think of it like a syllabus of sorts; we'll have key articles that should be read, theories to teach & skills to instill. By the end of the "class" (er, research), the student can say "I know that!"

You're all smart undergrads. And though none of you are doing your current work for credit, many of you have, or know others that have. So tell me, why would a student choose to participate in research instead of a class? When you applied for the position that you have now, why did you? What were you expecting to get from this experience?

And along similar lines, after a couple weeks in, have your expectations been met?

What are some guidelines or procedures (using syllabus lingo here) that may make the experience better? More educational?

In the coming weeks we'll be laying out goals & expectations for the students that receive credit for research. Any ideas that you have for the design & implementation are much appreciated.

(feel free to comment on this post, or create your own post in response)

Progress

Not so much new stuff for last week.
Organized more text chat data for the video game analysis, and now on to the audio chat data. Also, Lindsay finished transcribing all the audio chat data as well. (Finding it quite difficult to go through the audio chat data because it has to be in sync with the game screenshot video in order for me to properly analyze it.) In addition, we went through several rounds of testing out the data coding scheme using the text chat transcripts and managed to refine it further.

For this week, we (hopefully) expect to begin coding the data using the scheme.

On Saturday, I presented Catalina's research on self-affirmation & Facebook to alumni at the Communication Department open house and I think it went really well! A good number of people showed up and I had a great time talking with everyone :)

I have been working on the list of deception books for Jeff, and now need to go through the books to try to get a sense of different categories they might fall into. Part of the book proposal for Jeff's book is a "Primary Positioning" section where you lay out the other types of similar books already on the market and where the proposed book falls in comparison. So, now that I have a decent-sized collection of deception books sitting in the lab, I can start to group the books into different categories (academic, popular, etc.).

I still need to finish up coding for Sally, but we are still waiting on some of the translations. Some of the Spanish translations came in, but they weren't very good and seemed as if someone plugged the status update into a junky online translator and copied and pasted the results into the google doc...

So this week, I am hoping to finish up the coding (if we get translations), work on the books, and whatever else comes up :)

Making Progress

This week I transcribed a couple of interviews from doctors at Weill and reread the other ones while going over my notes or making new ones in an attempt to discover some underlying themes. Here's what I'm noticing that people have said so far:

• Many people have mentioned what I like to call a "lack of altruism." In other words, no one collaborates just to help someone else out. There has to be motivation from both parties and mutual benefit.
• Even with all the communication technology we have today, most people have mentioned that face to face meetings are still the best way to keep track of progress
• People can't be made or forced to work together for the sake of collaboration. There should be complementary expertise or a gap that needs to be filled.

Professor Birnholtz pointed out that sometimes going with what people say isn't the most reliable way to analyze interviews, that it's a good idea to read between the lines a little to discover true intentions or motivations. This is new to me and I'm a little confused by it, I suppose because it's a subtle technique and requires very close reading. Hopefully as I get used to reading more closely it'll become more natural for me.

I also started contacting some individuals for interviews, but so far, have only gotten one response. Maybe I'll get some more replies next week.

Finally, I'm sad I had to miss the farmer's market on Thursday. I hope I don't have to miss too many more of the "column B" activities!

IRB and Interviews

This week ended with some interesting developments. We are still trying to find organizations and companies that would be willing to participate. Problem is that the deception part of the project is being downplayed a bit, which means I need to tweak the interview script. (It would be a little awkward asking strangers how they lie in the work place...but I'm up for the challenge). I keep imagining the scene from "Office Space" where the employees of "Initech" are being interviewed by consultants. Anyways, I've finished up the IRB amendment forms, and am waiting to hear back from a friend who works at a moderately sized company. By next week, I'm hoping to have established access to an org, and by the end of this month I should start the interviews. Hope everyone's projects are going well. Peace

Granola making (who doesn't love homemade granola??? yes, it takes a little while to bake, but we can do other fun times while waiting)

***fun things

Fun things to do

Sitting in the lab munching on my broccoli and thinking of ideas for fun things to do as a group :)

Bonfire! (s'mores, roasted apples, anyone have drums/other instruments so we can make music??)

Trips to local U-pick farms so we can go pick fresh berries and fruit

Granola making (who doesn't love homemade granola??? yes, it takes a little while to bake, but we can do other fun times while waiting)

Baking cookies

Cornell Plantations

....

(late) post

The past week flew by and I too forgot that a post was needed. Yikes. I will be more on top of this in the coming months.

I'm currently a member of the following project teams. For each, we're addressing the following questions:

Research-Oriented Virtual Organizations. How do they emerge? How are they sustained? How can we make them more effective? Very interesting project. I am a big proponent of facilitating collaboration & community between people from near & far.

Digital Deception: Jeff's first book. What other deception books are on the market? Which niche will his fill? How can we supplement his manuscript so the publishers get the best possible sense of his work? What will be most interesting tidbits to put on the supplemental website? Another cool project. The last book I helped with was a book on film that Tim Murray finished during the fall of my senior year. I did the indexing and proofs. Glad to be back in the conceptual stages of a new book.

I will also be:

-Training Danielle, so her transition will be as seamless as possible.

-Continuing with Editorial Assistance for Discourse Processes (academic journal of which Jeff is an Editor)

-Working with Jon C. to update pubs, cvs, photos & project descriptions on the lab sites
(Jeff: Idea -- lets have each group write up a description about their summer project & we can post some in the coming weeks)

-Developing a 'syllabus' type deal for the lab... more info. to come (this may be my next post)

-Keeping order with the personnel & scheduling info!

-Possibly working w/ Jeff, Natalie & Cat on the Intention to Lie paper

Plenty to keep me busy! Looking forward to a good summer.

Youtube video of photoshopping pics

Here is a video that is relevant for Jeff's website that will go w/the book on deception...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YP31r70_QNM&feature=related

Poster Project!

My first day of work was yesterday, and I immediately began working on a poster for the upcoming alumni event this Saturday. I spent most of the day reading through the 3 articles that I will be synthesizing on the poster. They all relate to deception in self-presentation, while each analyzing online dating profiles in a distinct way.

Now, I am trying to conceptualize the poster itself. I am starting to go through the different visual options and creating the actual layout of the poster. Should be a busy week!

Accomplishments thus far/things I am working on

Last week, I mainly helped Sally with her Facebook study. I unitized loads of status updates and coded the unitized updates for factual, cognitive, or emotional self-disclosures. I am almost done with all of the coding, but am waiting for the rest of the status updates to be translated. Once I finish coding all of the status updates and Mark creates a master spreadsheet with all of the coding information in it, I am going to go back and review all of the previous coding work and make sure it looks good and consistent.

I also started (and am currently working on) researching all of the books about deception published in the last decade for Jeff. He needs to provide the publishers with an idea about all of the different types of books about deception, why his is different than others, and why his will be a best-seller.

This week, I am going to keep working on finding books (going to go to the library pretty soon), and hopefully finish the coding work for Sally if the rest of the status updates get translated.

:)

OpenMessenger First Week

So yeah. Not much to say about OpenMessenger. Last week I went through all of the sensors and monitors attached to the program to make sure that they work. Here's a rundown:

• Keyboard Monitor: Works. Needs a longer timer between each input process.
• Microphone Monitor: Works. Needs a new threshold for actually reporting activity, but the differences between real noise and background noise is significant.
• EyeTracker: Unknown. I will be setting up and calibrating the EyeTracker this afternoon with Lindsay.
• Screen Sensor: Works. Needs a monitor written to actually process the data.
• Webcam Sensor: Same as above.

In general, we are looking into alternate ways for the Monitors to report a lack of activity. Currently they are broadcasting a lot of events when nothing is going on. If we code the OmniWindow to only show changes in activity and change the monitors to only send events on changes, we can cut down on network traffic a bit as well as only display information that is relevant.

Speaking of the OmniWindow, there are a few things that need to be added, including Mouse support for debugging purposes, as well as code to display activity icons. The activity icons should fade out over time to make sure we keep clutter to a minimum.

This will be my last blog post for two weeks as I'm going on vacation this Thursday for 10 days. Matt Lepage will be working on OpenMessenger in the meantime, and for the rest of the summer. We hope to have OM working by the end of the month, and be able to devise a study using it around then.

Things we've accomplished so far

For the past weeks, we the video game research group has accomplished several tasks. First we managed to define a rough outline of our data coding scheme, tested it out by running it through several data transcripts, and received feedback from Jeremy. After several more stages of polishing the scheme, we managed to create a newly organized version of the coding scheme divided into a more refined and detailed level of top level and lower level hierarchies.

I also organized several game text logs using the video data of the game experiments, and Lindsay managed to finish transcribing most of the audio chat data. For this week, we plan to test our new data coding scheme using the transcripts and fix whatever is necessary.

First Few Weeks

Over the past two weeks I've pretty much been getting myself acquainted with the distributed collaboration project. I started out by reading the project proposal and a related CSCW paper, as well as other papers that were referenced in order to get a feel for the theories upon which the project is based.

Additionally, I've read interview transcripts and done some reading on qualitative data analysis as well as clarified some things with Xuan, a partner on this project who handed over much of her previous work to us.

Finally, I transcribed three of Xuan's interviews and one and a half of Laura's (one of them is currently in progress; I'm tired of having silicone stuffed inside my ears and am taking a break from transcribing). Julia and I also attempted to provide some insight to students taking the summer COMM/INFO 2450 course. Hopefully we didn't just bore them!

Hello All!

Kerwell and I (in conjunction with Ashley, Laura in New York City and Xuan in China) are examining distributed collaboration between faculty and researchers on Cornell's Ithaca campus and doctors at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York.

This week I received a crash course in ethnographic research methods, brought myself up to date on the previous article published as well as the VOSS proposal.

I read and took notes on all the transcripts of the interviews Laura and Xuan conducted, and transcribed one of Xuan’s interviews.

Finally, I spent some quality time with the survey data collected before and after collaborator retreats held in Ithaca and Scranton, PA. I entered the data into spreadsheets that Xuan had started. This project took me a lot longer than I expected, reinforcing the “doctor’s have terrible handwriting” stereotype. I modified the spreadsheet formatting so they were not only as clear as possible to read but also more conducive to data analysis.

During our project team meeting yesterday I created a rather snazzy list of important dates, long and short term goals, and contact information to guide our work this summer. My upcoming tasks include putting together a codebook and summary tables for the survey data, begin scheduling local interviews, and familiarizing myself with the interview protocol.

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend!

Facebook and Butler Lies

My main task this week was looking at Facebook! Basically, I looked at the profiles of 3 different bilingual, non-USA-citizen subjects and gathered as many status updates as I could, up to ~50 per person. This is for Sally's project, where she's looking at whether people use the "language barrier" as a means to cater status updates to different audiences (e.g., "friends back home" vs. "new friends you're trying to make in the US").

Lots of meetings and reading - read a draft of Sally's paper, the coding guidelines for Facebook status messages/unitization, and the "butler lies" papers and coding guidelines for Lindsay's project. My main "to do list" for this week will be working with Lindsay and helping Sally organize everything into her master Excel spreadsheet.

In the long term, one goal is to help brainstorm ideas for collecting more data for Lindsay. It's fairly straightforward to get people to give you texts they've sent to others, but it's almost impossible to get them to let you ask the recipients questions about the same texts. It probably feels like an invasion of privacy, or perhaps comes across as "creepy", to ask for contact information for text recipients. One idea presented was to have people sign up for the study in pairs. However, doing so could definitely affect the percentage or nature of butler lies in the data.

Another long-term goal which I haven't even begun looking at is helping Prof. Hancock with website stuff.