Welcome to my homestead on the web. I am a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University’s School of Communication. I am broadly interested in the dynamics of self-organization in online communities.
My research examines the social processes of how temporary online organizations emerge, stabilize, dissolve, and re-emerge. To understand how these high tempo collaborations are structured and change, I use methods in network analysis, multilevel statistics, simulation, and content analysis. My research employs a variety of large-scale behavioral data sets such as Wikipedia article revision histories, massively-multiplayer online game behavioral logs, and user interactions in a crowd-sourced T-shirt design community.
My dissertation examines the fluid coordination practices and novel roles which support Wikipedia’s rapid coverage of breaking news events like natural disasters, technological catastrophes, and political upheaval. This project has implications for improving our understanding of how distributed knowledge work can be performed under high tempo situations as well as how to train individuals and design technologies to support work in these increasingly prevalent contexts. I expect to defend the dissertation in Spring 2012.
I was born in Oregon and grew up outside Las Vegas, Nevada. I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received bachelors degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Science, Technology, and Society in 2006. At Northwestern, I am jointly advised by Noshir Contractor and Darren Gergle. I currently live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my wife who is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarden Group.
The header image is a fraction of my Facebook network. The nodes are my friends and the links indicate whether they are friends of each other. The nodes are colored based on a community detection algorithm and reflect friends clusters from high school, college, and graduate school. This image was created using NodeXL.