People
Faculty:
Hamid Ekbia (Director)
Hamid‘s research focus is on mediation, that is, on the processes through which objects and meanings are transformed in hybrid networks of interaction. In particular, he is interested in how technologies mediate interactions among individuals, organizations, and collectives.
Ronald Day
Ron‘s research is in the philosophy, history, politics, and culture of information, documentation, knowledge, and communication in the 20th and into the 21st centuries in the U.S. and Western Europe and in the discipline of Library and Information Science. The approach that he takes is that of Critical Information Theory (also called, ‘Critical Information Studies’). In this approach he uses rhetorical, conceptual, and historical analyses in order to explain the social, cultural, and political production of privileged concepts and instances of information, knowledge, and understanding.
Howard Rosenbaum
Howard‘s research interests are in Social informatics, e-business, information architecture, computer-mediated communication, managers and information in organizations, information policy and electronic networking, the intersection of sociological and library and information science theory.
Graduate Students:
Timothy Bowman
Tim‘s current work has involved exploring the uses of the sociologist Erving Goffman’s ideas and frameworks in HCI, particularly within the domain of ubiquitous computing. A variety of authors publishing in HCI-related periodicals use Goffman’s ideas in a range of ways to explain concepts such as identity, interaction, and more specifically impression management within ubiquitous computing environments. Based on a preliminary review of the HCI literature, Timothy examined the use of Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, the most heavily cited of his works, within the province of HCI. His contextual analysis has provided valuable insights into the ways in which Goffman’s concepts are being used in the literature, what aspects of Goffman’s work are cited most frequently, and what methodologies are being used to examine phenomenon using this framework. He feel that this is an important first step toward discovering the theories and methods that are being used within HCI to investigate impression management in ubiquitous computing. In the future, he will examine other theories and methods that are being used within this domain as well.
HyunSeung Koh
HyunSeung is currently interested in Human-computer Interaction, E-book, (Textual) Reading Online, Book/Reading History, Content Analysis for the Web, and Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis. More specifically, she is interested in the design of (textual) reading interfaces that help enhance readers’ reading experiences. One particular research interest is how to enhance readers’ active (or close) reading in the digital environment. Currently, she has been doing some research on readers’ annotation(s) in page margins, including underlines and highlights, to understand the nature of active reading better. Also, she has been doing some research on book history to get some insights for the design of e-books. The ultimate goal of her research is to develop a framework for personalized reading interfaces that support or facilitate a researcher’s seamless research processes in the digital environment, from the initial stage where they locate resources to the final stage where they read them closely, place them (with their own annotations) back in their personal databases, and retrieve them later for writing research papers.
Nantanoot (Apple) Suwannawut
Nantanoot is interested in information accessibility, particularly in alternative media for students with disabilities. She is also interested in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) in the realm of accessible interface design.
Lai Ma
Lai‘s research is concerned with understanding the epistemological and methodological assumptions of foundational concepts in information science. Her current work consists in the reconstructive analysis of concepts of information and the uses of the term ‘information’ in information science discourse and in reconceptualizing ‘information’ as communicatively and socially structured.
Inna Kouper
Inna is interested in Documentation and information, science communication, emerging technologies, social theory and modernity.
Ali Ghazinejad
On the technical side, Ali is interested in agent-based modeling of human group and individual behavior in various contexts including (online) social networks, market and face to face social interactions. He is also eternally fascinated by human mind and the underlying mechanisms that give rise to human intelligence and cognition, including human emotions. In spite of his early training in computer science, he is still more philosophically minded and therefore interested in topics such as philosophy of artificial intelligence and epistemology of modeling and simulation.
Previous Members
- Mark Millard
- Daniel Kutz