CHI 99 Online Communities Workshop
Position Paper

Judith Donath

Research Summary

I am interested in the relationship between technology and social interaction in the virtual world-- how does the design of an interface affect the way people perceive each other, the ways they choose to interact with each other, and the cultural mores they develop. Much of my work has focused on the design of experimental systems, such as visualizations of affiliation and role in online populations and abstract graphical interfaces for synchronous communication. The notion of identity is fundamental to this work: how does one represent the individual? what affordances does the system provide for self-expression? what does the interface reveal about the participants? How identity is established and expressed in a virtual environment has, I believe, a profound effect on how people behave and on the relationships they establish with one another.

Research Methodology

The practice in my research group could be called informed critical design. In part, it draws from the traditions of architecture and design: students develop an eye for design by reviewing and critiquing a variety of well-known interfaces and by presenting for critique a number of focused design studies. They also study a wide range of related work, drawing from sociology, anthropology, urban design, art history, cognitive science, etc. We are especially interested in developing a deeper understanding of how to use knowledge gained from experience in the everyday physical realm to inform the design of new virtual experiences that go "beyond being there" [Hollan and Stornetta] -- designs that expand upon the function (rather than the form) of their real world equivalents. In addition to our design work, we also carry out (often in conjunction with our visualization research) observational studies of online groups

Future Directions for My Research

• Faces in the interface. The face is the locus of identity and expression. We are inherently adept at recognizing faces and facial expressions provide a powerful and subtle means of conveying interest and emotion. Yet integrating faces into visual representations is highly problematic: live video can be very constraining, while more synthetic approaches tend to provide spurious and unintended information. How can we integrate the face into social interfaces - or can we devise an alternative representation that conveys much of the same information but in a different form?
• Data portraits. In the information world, one's data accumulates to form a vast sort of data shadow, comprised of anything from one's medical history to participation in a newsgroup to meanderings around the web. We are interested in finding ways to visualize this data in a useful and intuitive manner. Such data portraits would have 2 main purposes. Some are wholly private, designed as a way to help the individual manage the infomation that accumulates about his/her person - e.g. credit card data, medical data, reading patterns, etc. The goal here is to develop techniques that allow people to provide verifiable information about themselves with a high level of control about what data they reveal. Other data portraits are meant for more public consumption. Here our interest is in developing visualizations that function as self-representations in virtual environments, whether they be more abstracted spaces, such as visualizations of the visitors to a web site, or quite social spaces, such as a graphical chat room.
• Analysis of online cultural dispersion. The information ecology of the World Wide Web has produced some intriguing, but not well understood, patterns of cultural dispersion. Links lead people to information that interests them - and the link itself can be easily acquired and added to one's display of information "fashion". We are developing approaches to visualizing these patterns; the goal of this work is both to illluminate the Web's emerging cultures and to provide a new approach to navigating this space.

Other Important Issues for the Field

• Expressing identity in things that will be media.The car, for instance, is a medium of expression, showing not only one's taste in automotive styling and willingness or ability to pay for it, but also is often a peronal or political sounding board with bumpstickers proclaiming everything from one's views on abortion to sexual preference to one's child's academic standing. One's clothing, of course, is another outlet for expressing cultural affiliation, financial status, and recent tourist destinations. What happens as these and other aspects of daily life become increasingly digital - as one's car can update its messages according to an ever shifting context and as one's clothes and jewelry can respond to your emotional state and to the messages emanating from your neighbors' accessories?
• Identity game theory. People's behavior online may differ in its appearance and outcome from real world behaviors - but we can assume that the underlying motivations are similar, the differences stemming from the lack of embodiment and the economics of an information based environment. Understanding how people will behave given a particular set of circumstances is an important goal - one approach is to try to model behaviors. I will talk a bit about my work on identity and deception in Usenet newsgroups, which drew from theoretical biology's models of assessment and conventional signals. What other aspects of identity can be thus modelled? What can we learn from biology? from economics? sociology?

Selected Publications

• Donath, Judith. (in press). Being Real (draft). To appear in K. Goldberg (ed). The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology on the Internet.
• Xiong, Rebecca and Judith Donath. (in submission). PeopleGarden: Data Portraits in an Online Forum.
• Donath, Judith, Karrie Karahalios and Fernanda Viegas. 1999. Visualizing conversations. In
  Proceedings of HICSS-32, Maui, HI, January 5-8, 1999.
• Donath, Judith. 1998. Identity and deception in the virtual community. In M. Smith and P. Kollock (eds.) b Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge.