General Research Statement

My research seeks to push our general understanding of the processes and ramifications of using different media for communication about matters of importance to people. Specifically, my dissertation research focuses on understanding the communication of emotion across various technological media (face-to-face, telephone, and IM). My research examines media use in situations that, by virtue of high emotional involvement, are of crucial interest to two communicating parties, couples, in particular.

More generally, I am interested in bringing attention to the importance of interdisciplinary computer science; that is I am motivated to combine anthropology, psychology, and sociology to the design and overall understanding of technologies. This approach to computer science research is not only human-rich in the sense that system development and interaction carefully focus on the human user perspective; but it is integral to longevity of today's innovative technologies.

Dissertation Research Summary (Deborah Tatar, PhD, Advisor)

People are using technology to communicate with each other more frequently and for more diverse purposes. For example, teenagers are communicating with each other using IM with growing frequency (Grinter and Palen, 2002), and many companies have found that employees benefit from text-based interactions as a result of introducing instant messaging systems into the workplace (Erickson and Kellogg, 2000; Isaacs, et al., 2000).

Not only do people communicate to convey information, but sociological, psycholinguistic, and interpersonal studies suggest that people have non-information related goals in moment to moment interaction (Clark, 1996; Kiesler, 1996). In particular, they often seek to convey emotion. Communication of emotion is especially important when the stakes are high-that is, when people in close, personal relationships actually care more about their communication. Do current communication technologies support a full range of communication activities and purposes, most notably the communication of emotion?

This research starts with the belief that emotional and personal aspects of communication are important design factors. Moreover, I argue that these aspects of communication are not well-understood. This research investigates the effects of different technology design and use on the communication of emotion.