People

Hosted By

Lecia Barker is a Research Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. Her interest in online communities stems from her research on LambdaMOO, on which she finished a dissertation in 1998. Before joining the iSchool, Lecia also led the Assessment and Research Center in the Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (ATLAS) Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently Senior Research Scientist with the National Center for Women in IT (NCWIT). Her research interests include the use of tablet PCs to help the education of learning-impaired students and her work with NCWIT on women in IT.

Jocelyn Petyak is a master’s student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. Her primary research interests lie in Digital Archives and the ways that interactive technology in archives can provide accessibility to archival collections, particularly born-digital materials. She is also interested in how new media affects both traditional communications models and the way new media, including online communities, could be cataloged for archival and museum use. Jocelyn holds a B.A. in both English Literature and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

Contributors

Jaime Banks is a PhD student in Public Communication and Technology at Colorado State University. Her research focuses on identity construction and negotiation in such digital domains as virtual worlds, online games, and social media. She has authored papers in these areas, presenting at annual conventions for the International, Eastern, and Western States Communication Associations, and the Association for Education in Journalism & Mass Communication. Current research involves both theoretical and empirical research on identity fragmentation, researcher presence in virtual worlds studies, linguistic markers of user-avatar relationships in MMO voice-chat, aesthetics in virtual worlds, and social media users’ strategic creation and employment of screen names. Jaime holds a B.A. in Mass Communication from Mesa State College and an M.S. in Technical Communication from Colorado State University; she currently serves as lead research assistant on a large, federally funded project that examines social interaction and identity presentation in virtual worlds.

Andrea Baker is a Sociology Professor at Ohio University.  She has studied online relationships since 1997, and has more recently collected data on Rolling Stones fan sites to study the standard dichotomy between anonymous and real life personas in online communities.  She is also comparing various aspects of these fan communities such as type of leadership and material objects exchanged by the members.  Her past research includes an examination of relationships from online romance sites, discussion boards, games and chat rooms to see the escalation of relationships using technology as an intermediary.

Victoria Bernal is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. Professor Bernal’s research has addressed a range of issues relating to gender, migration, nationalism, transnationalism, development, cyberspace, and Islam. She has carried out ethnographic research in Eritrea, Tanzania, and the Sudan. Her contribution is based on her current major research project, “Eritrea Online: Diaspora, Cyberspace, and Citizenship,” which analyzes the Eritrean diaspora and its use of cyberspace to theorize the ways transnationalism and new media are associated with the rise of new forms of community, public spheres, and sites of cultural production.

Jamie Skye Bianco is an Assistant Professor in the Composition: Literacy, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, and Digital Media group at the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in digital media, digital composition and rhetoric, media theory, contemporary and transmedia narrative, and recently spearheaded the Digital Media at the University of Pittsburgh (DM@P) initiative. She is also the Editor and development lead of LateralLab, a new online experimental multimedia journal of the Cultural Studies Association. Her research focuses on creative critical digital media projects, affective design, DIY cultures and practices, and tactical media, and work related to online communities includes alternate reality games and communities of remix and creation. DM@P also collaborates with the XOmB Compound, a collectivized community of computer scientists who create open digital tools.

Dara Byrne is an Associate Professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, in the Department of Communication and Theater Arts. She is a specialist in critical language studies, intercultural communication, and digital media. Professor Byrne’s past work with online communities included studying identity and racial discourse in online communities, particularly BlackPlanet. She is currently researching vigilante justice on social networking sites.

Charles Isbell is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and the Associate Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research passion is “interactive artificial intelligence,” and he researches autonomous agents, interactive entertainment, some aspects of HCI, software engineering and programming languages. Professor Isbell previously spent time studying LambdaMOO, an early online community.

Casey O’Donnell is an Assistant Professor of Telecommunications at the University of Georgia. He has specialized in the analysis of video games, video games technologies, and how law and globalization influences technological worlds. His interests are directly related to the complex socio-technical intersections/interactions that occur during the design and development  of videogames. Professor O’Donnell’s research also includes “illegal” communities of “homebrew” coders online, including NDS homebrew development.

Mieke Schrooten is a PhD researcher at the Interculturalism, Migration and Minority Research Centre of the K.U.Leuven (University of Leuven) and a lecturer at the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel. She received her master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from Utrecht University in 2007. Currently, she is working on a PhD thesis on the relationship between migration and development. Mieke’s main research interests are in transnationality, migration, migrant communities, development, ethnicity and citizenship. She has published several articles in international journals on internal migration in Brazil and Brazilian migration to Belgium. Her contribution to the book will be based on her work studying Orkut, a Brazilian social networking site, as a virtual migrant community.

Megan Winget is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. Her general research interests include preservation of the cultural record, specifically intangible cultural materials, new media and time-based art, and the ability of collecting institutions (museums, libraries, and archives) to preserve, curate, and provide access to these intangible materials both physically and digitally. Her specific research interests include postmodern archival theory, the archival concepts of context and provenance, and representation of variable, ephemeral, and/or non-textual media.

Jude Yew is a Research Fellow for the DataNet project at the School of Information, University of Michigan. His goal as a researcher is to investigate and design systems that encourage individuals to share, participate and engage in prosocial behavior in online environments. His publications have investigated content sharing behavior in a variety of  contexts ranging from online music remixing communities to synchronous video sharing environements.  He is currently studying the users of Scratch and ccMixter to provide a socio-technical understanding of the relationship between amateur digital creators and the computational social system where they work.