Friday, 7 October 2011

Today's new Lovelace

It is Ada Lovelace day, but I think it's a coincidence that we have a female IT visiting lecturer today: Prof Nicole Ellison is giving a paper on Social Network Sites, Privacy and Social Capital. All welcome, MC413, 2-3.

Judging from her current research interests, I'm going to learn a lot:

  • Cliff Lampe and I have received funding from the National Science Foundation to examine ad-hoc collaborative processes, such as question-asking, in social network sites. Our foci at the moment include question-asking and answering in Facebook, how adults are using these sites to meet their informational and social support needs, and how social media can help socialize first-year students. More information about our work and research team is available on the TOIL lab site, and our recent publications can be found on my Publications page. As part of this project, I am lucky to be collaborating with many awesome scholars, such as Bernie HoganFred Stutzman,Jessica Vitak, and Rebecca Gray.
  • I recently received funding from the Gates Foundation to explore the potential for social media to address college-going behaviors among low-income and first-generation college students. We are currently working on a white paper synthesizing this literature and will be collecting data soon. I am working with the Collegeology group at USC to think about games for middle school and high school kids that could address gaps in knowledge and efficacy. 
  • Although I am not currently writing anything on the topic, I remain fascinated by issues around self-presentation in online dating environments and have done a fair bit of work in this area. My most recent publication is "Profile as Promise" with Jeff Hancock and Catalina Toma; it is available here.

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