[Asis-l] Judith Donath Seminar Sept 21 2pm, AVW 3258

[Shneiderman, Ben]

HCIL Seminar Series - Univ of Maryland College Park
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/about/events/HCIL-Seminars-Fall2004.html

September 21, 2004 Tuesday, 2:00pm, A.V. Williams Building 3258


   - - - Visualizing Email - - - 

   Judith Donath, Sociable Media Group, MIT Media Lab 
   Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences 
   http://www.media.mit.edu/~judith  

The email archives that people accumulate are a dense, complex, and highly personal record of their past interactions. As email becomes increasingly ubiquitous, these include not only their work interactions, but also their relationships with family members, friends, doctors, teachers, etc. However, current mail clients do little to support these archives beyond providing a basic filing and searching system. Furthermore, most of the research that has been done to make these archives more accessible has focused on the data-mining aspect of the problem.  Yet personal email archives are valuable to their owner's not solely because of the useful information they contain; they are valuable because they are a record of relationships, of the energy put into ideas, of the rhythms of discussions and the arrival of new people. This talk will address approaches to visualizing email archives based on the social material they contain.


Judith Donath is an Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab, where she directs the Sociable Media research group. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, synthesizing knowledge from fields such as graphic design, urban studies and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for online communities and virtual identities. She pioneered a number of social applications for the web, including the first postcard service ("The Electric Postcard"), the first interactive, juried art show ("Portraits in Cyberspace") and an early large-scale web event ("A Day in the Life of Cyberspace"). Recently, she directed "Id/Entity", an exhibit of collaboratively produced installations examining science and technology's transformation of the subject and form of portraiture. Her current research focuses on creating expressive visualizations of social interactions and on building experimental environments that mix real and virtual experiences. Professor Donath received her doctoral !
 and master's degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, her bachelor's degree in History from Yale University, and has worked professionally as a designer and builder of educational software and experimental media.
 
Host: Ben Shneiderman (ben at cs.umd.edu)
 

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