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Faculty Research Projects
This page is organized in alphabetical order by faculty member surname. You can return to the main research page to find faculty in each research area.
FDR's Fireside ChatsBroadly stated, my research interests are with public discourse, mass media and public policy. I have been concerned with identifying grammars of arguments that supported national policy initiatives and a national definition of the public interest in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Because these discourses were disseminated through emerging electronic media technologies, this historical and textual analysis includes an interest in the political function and uses of mass media as well as the invention of public policy and regulation for electronic media.
Although my work has centered on political discourse, through the process of incorporating these interests into my classes, I came to realize that similar frameworks for media use and public discourse were being used by corporate America. I have become interested in corporate uses of public discourse and media to define or influence public policy as well as manage their public image. There are numerous examples in many areas of public concern; however, the confused appropriation of public and private interests in current telecommunications policy has led to fractured and ineffective outcomes. My interests lie with not only the arguments brought to bear upon current circumstances but also with the continuity and evolution of public and private arguments over telecommunications policy. These interests are the beginning of a project.
My future research will continue the study of rhetorical practices of public memory and their mediation through communicative technology. How a past is called forth, disseminated and experienced is but one of the many questions new technologies pose to the traditional role of rhetoric as a practice which shapes public action. The serialized experience of listening to the radio that provided the means for forming a sense of national community in the 1930s offers a model for this kind of research.
My current project studies FDR's Fireside Chats, uncovering the use of public memory to forge and maintain a national community to confront the Depression and the War. The Fireside Chats demonstrate the use of communicative technology for the creation of public consensus and community. The study is significant because it illuminates the rhetorical practices that forged a grammar of public argument at an historical moment when national community was at first a real possibility.
Currently I am working on a number of research projects with common themes: The first involves an extension of the work that I did with Professor Nancy Frank in the area of personality traits and leadership roles. The research objective covers the question of how managers actually choose appropriate roles to play and how cognitive styles, reflected in personality traits, affect these choices. The interplay of traits and leadership roles, for example, is a well-known tool for selecting individuals and matching them with organizational positions. If effective managers are more successful in handling novel or exceptional situations and generally exhibit greater behavioral and cognitive complexity than less effective managers, do men and women alike manifest these behaviors in playing organizational leadership roles across hierarchical levels? An interesting question is whether the Competing Values Framework (CVF) leadership profile of successful managers is affected by gender differences. Therefore, the second research project is set out to investigate women in leadership roles. In other words, given the expanded presence of women in managerial positions, it becomes increasingly important to understand whether men and women share similar behavioral characteristics when it comes to playing the CVF leadership roles? Are there any significant differences between men and women across managerial levels? Do they emphasize the same roles across different situations or task environments? Also relevant, however, is the question of whether women actually manage in accordance with the predictions of Feminist Theory. Given present-day attention to Feminist theories of leadership, it is appropriate ask whether women align with traditional feminist role strengths within the CVF when compared to men, and, in particular, whether men and women demonstrate different or similar CVF role strengths.
My research focuses on how individuals negotiate their relationships with organizations, including both employee-employer relationships, and healthcare consumer-healthcare provider relationships. I am particularly interested in how these processes are shaped by new information and communication technologies.
Overcoming Barriers to African American Women’s Reproductive Healthcare Seeking
African American women suffer significant disparities in disease incidence and health outcomes in relation to reproductive health, including HIV/AIDS, STIs, breast and cervical cancer. Small towns and cities, home to increasing numbers of African American women, present unique contextual challenges for reproductive health promotion: limited numbers of reproductive healthcare providers, difficulty in traveling to and from providers’ locations, and privacy concerns, in addition to lack of knowledge about preventive reproductive healthcare, and fear of discovering a health problem, which are faced by low income African American women more generally. This study will evaluate the impact of community-based education and transportation interventions on healthcare seeking, with the goal of identifying effective health promotion strategies that can be reproduced in similar settings and improving women’s health.
Communication Among Healthcare Providers and Families of Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries in a Rehabilitation Setting
The project’s goal is to arrive at a better understanding of the range of problems that staff and families encounter in their interactions, and to identify interactional resources that might be useful in resolving them. The study will combine analysis of conversational interactions between staff and families with analysis of follow-up interviews.
Technology Innovation
The IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, D.C. has awarded a research stipend of $20,000 to Senem Guney to start a longitudinal study of IBM@Albany NanoTech, a first-of-its-kind collaborative enterprise housing multiple R&D consortia among international partners. This study investigates the development of novel organizational forms and communication practices used by IBM@ANT and its academic and industrial partners as they engage in inter-organizational collaboration for high-technology innovation at Albany NanoTech. Complex collaborative enterprises such as Albany NanoTech are increasingly becoming the norm for innovative product development in the high-technology industry, as organizations face the need to make investments that go beyond their individual capabilities in order to stay ahead of changing competitive threats. Prof. Guney is beginning an organizational ethnography of a key partner in Albany NanoTech. One of the objectives of this study is to demonstrate the significance of the disciplinary perspective of Communication Studies in providing insights into social-organizational phenomena that are crucial in the maintenance and success of these collaborative enterprises. The collection of ethnographic data for this study started in May 2007 and will continue through the next academic year.
Communication Technologies and Democracy
My research and teaching interests focus on communication and technology, with a special emphasis on the relationship between new communication technologies and democratic processes and practices. For the last several years I have been involved in organizing several small conferences bringing together scholars sharing technology and democracy, understood from a variety of perspectives. For more information about this work you can visit the web site: http://www.albany.edu/wwwres/edemocracy/
Development of Community Information Systems
I am engaged in the design and development of a community information system in a project funded by the National Science Foundation, with Jim Zappen of the Department of Language, Literature, & Communication and Sibel Adali of the Computer Science Department, both at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This interdisciplinary team is working with approximately 20 government and not-for-profit community organizations to design and develop a community information system devoted to services and resources for youth and to study its diffusion over time. We are addressing a variety of research questions focusing on the organizational and community considerations that are brought to bear in the development and evaluation of a community information system. Our research works with a numerous constituencies in the local community, including (a) representatives of government and not-for-profit organizations providing programs and resources for youth, (b) kids between the ages of 5 and 18, and (c) parents and other social support personnel, to explore how these diverse community actors view the uses and purposes of a community information system and what information needs and functionalities they would find useful in designing and developing this system. We will also soon be interested in exploring the factors associated with the adoption and use of such a system. Although the Connected Kids information system is still under construction, you are invited to take a look at its current status at http://www.cs.rpi.edu/ck/
Participatory Design in Software Development
Zappan, Adali, and I are also creating a model of processes and practices of participatory design in software system development. Our research is one of few projects that employs participatory design as a strategy for the development of a community information system. In doing so, we take seriously the challenge of determining what community actors want to do with community information. In order to address this issue, we are asking (a) what processes and practices can we use to determine users’ intentions and uses for community information systems, especially in communities of diverse and potentially competing interests and (b) how can we incorporate these interests into a system design that is necessarily complex and multipurpose rather than standardized and single-purpose?
Development of an Action Research Agenda
Zappan, Adali, and I are developing a model of specific steps and considerations in the development of an action research agenda in digital government projects. Increasingly, social scientists are working with computer scientists to develop software systems that constitute interventions in the social, cultural, political, and organizational dimensions of community life. Such interventions constitute new ways of information sharing, deliberation over policy options, collaboration on joint projects, or other aspects of governance. However, very little is known about how such interventions are designed, implemented, and sustained over time. We are attempting to consider this question somewhat systematically in reflecting on how our project has developed and the resources, commitments, and support required for sustainability beyond the period of our project’s funding.
Electronic Journal of Communication
I am currently editing one of the world’s first peer reviewed electronic scholarly journals, the Electronic Journal of communication/La revue electronique de communication which is published by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship. The table of contents for the journal can be perused at http://www.cios.org/www/ejcrec2.htm
(Re-) Discovering the Communication Engine of Neighborhood Health Effects
In recent years, my research has evolved around two interrelated axes: (a) advancing our understanding of the role communication plays as a social mechanism through which the physical, built, and social environment impacts urban residents’ health; and (b) investigating how community organizations, media, and other institutional resources can increase health literacy and improve access to health care in ethnically diverse communities. In pursuing these lines of inquiry, I aim to address a few of the gaps in the burgeoning and exciting work currently being done in a variety of fields, from sociology and anthropology, to economics, geography, and the life sciences, on ‘neighborhood effects’ and health.
Working with colleagues from California, Georgia, Iowa, and New Jersey, I am currently developing papers that: (a)explore if and how neighborhood-based communication networks that include residents, community organizations, and local and ethnically-targeted media, can be leveraged to build health literacy in diverse ethnic communities, particularly around diabetes and hypertension; (b) investigate the extent to which communicative ties among neighbors in a community can help them overcome structural constraints to better health care access (and, if so, under what conditions); and (c) map the communication ecologies individuals construct in the process of their everyday lives to manage health problems.
Building Civic Engagement in Diverse Ethnic Communities
Currently, I am working on two related projects with colleagues from USC in Los Angeles, Oregon State University in Corvallis, and the University of Iowa in Iowa City.
The first is focused on determining the impact of communicative ties within and across ethnic groups in a particular residential community on civic engagement. In previous work, we found that the degree to which residents in a variety of multi-ethnic communities are integrated into the indigenous communication network (consisting of neighbors and their families, community organizations, and local media) predicts higher levels of neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and political participation – all three conceived as important dimensions of civic engagement. As part of this new project we are investigating how the quality of inter-group relations among residents of different ethnic backgrounds (primarily of Hispanic and African American origin) mediates the relationship between communication in the residential community and civic engagement. This work builds upon and extends prior research done on bridging (i.e., inter-group) and bonding (i.e., intra-group) social capital.
The second project centers on the question of how residents’ travel patterns in and out of their neighborhood in order to access services and other resources influences their levels of neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and political participation. Prior research suggests that civic engagement at the local level depends in part on the presence of a vibrant business community. Several studies have focused on how local business owners and managers become involved in the everyday life of the communities they serve and how they help build and sustain civic engagement. In other projects, researchers have argued that small, local businesses are often places where staff or employees with very different ethnic backgrounds first encounter each other and forge relationships (i.e., where bridging social capital is created). Looking beyond local businesses at the role of other neighborhood institutional resources, considerable work has been done to demonstrate the positive impact that local, community and non-profit organizations can have in terms of building civic engagement in a neighborhood. Building on our own past work where we elaborate the often overlooked role of communication as a process through which civic engagement is constructed at the neighborhood level, in this project we begin to explore what happens to civic engagement when residents are forced to leave their neighborhood in search of services and resources because they do not exist where they live or because they are not of good quality.
Ethnic Media in Local and Global Worlds
Many sources point to the rise in the number of ethnic media in the U.S. and worldwide. Currently, the National Directory of Ethnic Media, which is compiled and updated every year by New America Media (a collaboration of ethnic media founded in 1996 by non-profit Pacific News Service) contains information on over 2,200 ethnic media organizations in the United States. The 2006 Ford Foundation Report indicates that in New York, for example, the circulation of Chinese language dailies has grown from about 170,000 in 1990 to more than half a million today. One in three New Yorkers are Hispanic and four Spanish-language dailies serve this population. In other major cities in the United States, the European Union, and Australia, the growth of ethnic media is equally significant.
This reality, my professional background in journalism, as well as research I have been engaged in with colleagues in the numerous diverse ethnic communities of Los Angeles, in California, led to a joint effort with Vikki Katz (at Rutgers University) and Sandra Ball-Rokeach (at the University of Southern California) to address the growing need within academia for a new book that can serve as a core text in communication, media, and journalism studies, in particular, to better understand the socio-political, cultural, and economic roles ethnic media play in a globalizing world.
To do so, we have conducted an extensive review of the existing literature and research – old, new, and ongoing – done worldwide on ethnic, immigrant, minority, indigenous, and diasporic media. We are also building upon the knowledge we have accumulated through our personal and collective work with colleagues at the Metamorphosis Project (http://www.metamorph.org/). In addition, we are grateful for the insightful discussions we have been able to have with academics, journalists and media producers from many countries. Although our book, Ethnic Media in Local and Global Worlds (working title), is slated for publication in 2010, that does not mean that our interest in the many dimensions of the subject have an expiration date.
The Social Impact of Voice-Over-IP and Broadband Technologies
Since 2007, my work has focused on two particular topics. In both cases, my research has been driven by the need to continue to seek ways to bridge digital divides. This need emerges clearly from data collected from a variety of sources, in the U.S. and beyond. The first topic I have been investigating is the social uses of Voice-over-IP technology and related applications, especially among ethnic minority populations. A study I conducted in 2008-2009 with Latino residents from two Los Angeles communities suggested that many Latinos, regardless of whether or not they were Internet users, recognize the brand names of some VoIP service providers and positively associate VoIP with a lower cost compared to conventional PSTN-based telephone services. However, most do not take steps to adopt the technology mainly because they do not know enough about how it works or how to gain the savings. Those who do take steps to use VoIP rely less on their home landline and enjoy lower cell phone bills, according to this exploratory study. Most also have stopped using calling cards. This initial study showed that Latino VoIP adopters spend on communication services an average of 13 percent less each month than Internet connectors who do not use VoIP.
The second topic I have been exploring is the barriers to broadband adoption among ethnic minority populations. Currently, I am working on a proposal for a study to further investigate (a) the barriers that keep Latino dial-up users from switching to broadband and (b) to improve our understanding of socio-demographic factors, but also attitudes and behaviors that keep non-Internet users offline. In addition, the study aims (c) to examine what incentives at the individual level and what interventions at the policy level could improve broadband adoption rates across the U.S. and particularly among Latinos. Contrary to many studies, which focus on English-dominant Latinos only, this study will target both English and Spanish-dominant Latinos.
Uses of Role and Relationship Categories in Social Interaction
In collaboration with Jenny Mandelbaum, I have been exploring the ways in interaction in which people use their understanding of the activities, competencies, rights, and responsibilities they see as appropriate for people in specific role and relationship categories. Using Conversation Analytic methods, we study the conversational actions that people perform when they invoke a role or relationship category. For example, in explaining why she didn’t do an action the other person thought she should have done, the person said “I’m only the grandma.” This serves as an explanation inasmuch as the speaker can rely on the other person’s understanding of the responsibilities of “grandmothers” in relation to those of “mothers.”
The Enactment of Physician and Patient Authority Roles
In collaboration with Sean Rintel, I have been studying the ways in which physicians report results of medical tests to patients during medical consultations and the responses of patients as they hear the reports. We show how physicians may form up their reports in ways that cast them as the sole authority capable of understanding the readings on the medical test. Alternatively they may form up reports in ways that treat the patient as capable of understanding technical medical knowledge and encourage their keeping track of their health indices. In their responses, patients may use practices that either accept or negotiate being cast as a traditional patient role or a more participatory patient role. Thus both physicians and patients enact and negotiate their roles during medical consultations on a turn-by-turn basis.
Patients' Practices During Medical Consultations
In turn with a growing interest in how patients, as well as physicians, shape medical encounters, I am collaborating with Paul Denvir in studying a series of practices that patients use during medical consultations. 1) Physicians can not discuss the medical evidence that would support or refute patients’ theories as to the causes of their medical conditions if those theories are not articulated by the patient. In such cases, patients leave without having their concerns properly considered. One area of investigation is whether and how patients reveal their own theories about the causes of their medical conditions to the physicians and how patients react to patients’ articulating their lay diagnoses. 2) Many patients find at the end of their consultations that they did not ask the questions that they hoped to ask and/or did not get adequate answers to their questions. A second area of investigation involves the ways in which patients seek information from: physicians and the ways physicians’ react to the attempts. 3) Patients who visit a physician knowing that they want specific tests or medication face the problem of how to ask for the services or medication from a physician who is regarded as having the authority and expertise to make those determinations. The third area of investigation is how patients make requests for specific medicine or tests from physicians.
Obtaining Informed Consent from Surgical Patients
In collaboration with Liva Jacoby, a medical ethicist at Albany Medical College, and Mark White, a urologist at Albany Medical College, I am developing a pilot study on the processes of exchanging information and making treatment decisions consent in surgery. We want to find out how surgeons and patients participate in information exchange and decision making in the following circumstances: when family members are present, when patients have apparently already made their decisions, and when providing more information seems to make the patients more anxious. We will use a multi-method approach, including conversation analysis of audiotapes of patients consulting urologists and interviews with both patients and surgeons. We plan to use the results of the pilot study to apply for funds to support an expanded study of informing and decision-making processes in a variety of surgical practices.
Increasing Rates of Organ Donation
I am collaborating with Teri Harrison at the University at Albany, Carla Williams of the New York Alliance for Donation and Tom Feeley, George Barnett, and Tom Jacobson at the State University of New York at Buffalo to conduct a multi-campus intervention study to increase intention to donate and family notification. In 2002, we conducted a pilot study of the effects of a semester-long course on public campaigns in which the students are given information on organ and tissue donation and then design and implement a public awareness campaign on organ and tissue donation. We use a multi-method approach, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and qualitative analyses of tapes of discussions between family members. I am directing two studies in the larger project. A conversation analytic study of family discussions will describe the dynamics of family discussions about organ and tissue donation. An interview study of students at the conclusion of the semester will determine which in-class activities, discussions with friends and family members, and campaign activities are most salient for students in the course and will explore the obstacles that students anticipated when they considered discussing donation with family members. The research team is waiting to hear whether a three year grant to which they applied from Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) will be funded.
Interaction in a Management Meeting
I am working on a project in which I analyze interaction in management meetings of a corporation in transition. I discuss the relationship between implicit premises regarding the decision-making process and the methods that the participants use in making decisions. Using conversation analytic methods, I identify the practices of gaining speakership and ways of treating co-present parties that are consistent with each set of decision-making premises.
See faculty page
Robert E. Sanders (Professor Emeritus)
Children's Development of Strategic Communication
Based on theoretical and empirical work in several of my past publications, it seems that an adult competence in social interaction is to be able to anticipate how their pending utterances might affect the future course of the interaction, and to strategically adjust the content, style, and/or sequential placement of their turns at speaking to foster a desired course for the interaction (I term this "neo-rhetorical participation in interaction"). This competence to speak so as to influence anticipated interactional development must be something children learn, and it is a question for future research how its acquisition affects a person's social effectiveness and attractiveness. This project is aimed at finding out what kinds of strategic adjustments children can and do make in interactions with peers, at what ages children exhibit such a competence, how children of 6 years and younger differ by age in this regard, and whether there are individual differences among children, and the influence of children's social and family environments on acquiring and using this competence. The project has begun with examination of recorded interactions between pairs of children 4-5 years old, and 5-7 years old, who were given a set of Lego Building Blocks to play with, and were asked to construct one thing working together. Initial findings are that 5-7 year old children make frequent, complex adjustments in the wording and placement of their utterances for strategic purposes, and that gender is not a factor in this. The project is currently focused on conflict avoidance and conflict resolution among these same children.
A Theory of the Interpretation of Language in Context
It is well understood in the communication field, as well as language pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, and the ethnography of speaking that what a sentence means out of context, based on its word meanings and grammar, is not necessarily the same as what that sentence means in specific instances when it is spoken or written as part of an interaction or text. This project carries forward my earlier efforts to formulate how it is that people figure out what language means right now, in the context in which they find it. This cannot be a matter of guesswork, the process of interpretation has to be systematic enough and shared by people sufficiently to make mutual understanding -- communication itself -- possible. This project replaces my original theory that linked these interpretations to what would make the language in question relevant to other language in the surrounding interaction or text. Now I am working on evidence and arguments that these interpretations depend on how to make the language relevant to the ongoing activity in which the speaker and/or interpreter are engaged. This approach makes it possible to explain both occasional differences as well as frequent concurrence between speakers and their interpreters regarding an utterance's interpretation, why and how shared cultural knowledge plays a key role in making such interpretations, and how it is possible for language in context to have novel interpretations in specific circumstances.
Interaction Strategy in a Decision-Making Context
This project is a "real world" case study that applies and tests my past work on persuasion and compliance-seeking, specifically how people influence what others say and do in interpersonal interactions. The datum is a documentary film of several meetings of a company's management team as they debated whether to develop a more formal organizational structure in anticipation of the retirement and succession of the company's founder and CEO. The project is to analyze the interaction among managers on this issue, showing strategic aspects of the way each side stated its case so as to make it harder for the opposition to disagree without seeming to either miss the point or for their response to be interpretable in undesirable ways. The analysis shows the strategic mistake that the losing side made, and also shows that neither side engaged in the debate in such a way as to find out whose ideas were better for the company, but rather so as to hinder the ability of the opposition to state its views without seeming irrelevant or unreasonable.
Handbook of Language and Social Interaction
Kristine Fitch and I are co-editing a handbook that follows up on an article in Communication Yearbook 24 (2000) by Sanders, Fitch, and Pomerantz in which we provided an overview of scholarship in the Language and Social Interaction Divisions of the International Communication Association, and National Communication Association. The handbook project has three goals. First, to give the disciplinary subarea of language and social interaction greater definition and visibility; second, to promote greater understanding and cross-fertilization among graduate students and scholars within the subareas of language and social interaction; third, to familiarize scholars from outside the communication field with trends and current thinking about research on language and social interaction, and to recruit them to share their work in our professional meetings and journals.
Mihye Seo is an Assistant Professor who received her Ph.D. from the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. Originally from Korea, Prof. Seo intially started studying communication to pursue a career in journalism. Along the way she became fascinated by studying how the effects of media intertwine with everyday life, and decided to change her focus purely to communication.
Her research focuses on the interface of mass media effects and emerging technologies, and attempts to understand the effects of mass media in the realm of politics. She is particularly interested in the differential influence of various mass media (including the Internet) on producing informed and participatory citizens. She is also interested in the role of mass media in shaping social reality and its consequences in the process of political decision-making. Prof. Seo is currently working on a study with the Mind Lab called media causation, which examines how individuals attribute social issues to the mass media.
Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS)
I am involved in the design and construction of information dissemination, analysis, and retrieval systems for scholarly research and education and in researching and building typological systems necessary for such information technologies to be effective.
With Teresa Harrison, I created the Comserve project, which has since grown into the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS), an independent, Web-based not-for-profit scholarly association facilitating the use of information technologies in the service of communication education and research (see http://www.cios.org/). The scope of this project has expanded dramatically from a first-of-kind innovation in the use of IT to enhance an academic discipline’s scholarly communication to become a resource incorporated into the day-to-day process of inquiry and education at institutions throughout the field. The Comserve project was among the first efforts to create a set of online electronic services through which scholars could share resources for education and research, and it did so nearly 10 years before the World Wide Web.
I am the designer, editor, and principal author of an extensive suite of database and other software systems comprising the CIOS. These include: (1) the ComIndex database which indexes scholarship published in nearly 100 communication journals between the years 1970 - 2003 (in total more than 40,000 articles); (2) the ComAbstracts database, a full text database of article abstracts encompassing 65 journals between approximately 1960-2003 (in total more than 17,000 article abstracts); (3) The ComWeb archive indexing 80,000 web pages from 450 academic web sites in communication; (4) the full text of more than a ten year run of ten of the field’s professional journals.
Concept Analysis of the Field’s Scholarly Literature
My CIOS work has produced several important resource collections that have created an unusually rich research opportunity to study the evolution and interdependence of concepts in the communication field. Accordingly, I am now undertaking scientometric concept map analyses of the interrelationships among pivotal theoretical ideas extracted through statistical/linguistic analysis of the literature of the communication discipline gathered in CIOS databases. The project uses a suite of original software programs I’ve authored that parse the titles of the data records from the ComIndex database. The resulting dataset of approximately 200,000 unique words is sifted to eliminate junk terms (“and”, “but”, “anyway”, “those”, “who”, and many more) and to isolate core concepts, and normalized by converting British to U.S. spelling. My procedure then reduces the resulting set of normalized core concepts to their linguistic root forms. As well, the procedure lumps synonymous concepts (television, TV, tube), recognizes phrases of disciplinary relevance as singular concepts (e.g., “third person effect”, “spiral of silence”, “genre theory”, “social movements theory”, etc.) and appropriately splits divergent concepts that happen to have common linguistic roots (organic and organization).
I have been conducting statistical studies of the frequencies of co-occurrence within the resulting set of root key concepts and developing software systems that allow live exploration of the strength of these relationships (e.g., “gender” and “talk” co-occur with a particular frequency, “rhetoric” and “argument” co-occur with a particular frequency, etc.). I have also created a mapping process in which concepts are related to each other in a graphical display where distance indicates degree of relationship.
As the field approaches a future in which access to our literature becomes exclusively electronic, my work is discovering trends and regularities that will serve as the foundation for designing interfaces based on keywords and co-occurrence that will enable future generations of scholars and students to recover primary and associated texts, to explore and contact the often otherwise invisible networks of scholars who have contributed to theoretical and applied work in the field, and to view documents within the context of other contextualizing resources (web presentations, electronic discussions) that may help to situate them more precisely within the field’s system of knowledge.
This work, constituting a kind of theoretical data mining, has the potential to serve as a test-bed for examining hypotheses about conditions under which theoretical ideas rise and fall within the literature of our discipline. Further, it will be possible to construct in software an entirely new kind of educational experience for students of communication, a kind of virtual reality exploratorium of this mapped network of concepts, allowing students of communication to view and experience viscerally through the deployment of a 3D interface, the strength of interrelationship these concepts have acquired in the accumulated experience of the field.
Political Conversation via the Internet
Political conversation is a critical component to a healthy public sphere and a functioning democracy. In modern times, political conversation primarily happens with friends and family often within the confines of the home, depriving the public sphere of a critical component. On the internet, there exist spaces devoted to political, public discussion. These discussion spaces bring people together who are diverse in geography and political ideology, calling into being the possibility for a genuine public in which people can express their opinions and survey the opinions of others.
My research on political conversation has gone in two directions. The first direction was an examination of what motivates people to talk politics online. I interviewed people who participate in discussions in three different discussion spaces online to understand what they like and dislike about these online discussions. The second direction is an attempt to measure the quality of online discussions. I have developed a coding scheme to assess elements of political discussions (online or offline), and evaluate the overall quality of the discussions. The coding elements are based on the normative deliberation literature, the conversation and discourse analysis literatures, and prior studies on political talk (online and offline).
Political Deliberation
Political Deliberation and E-Rulemaking
With Peter Muhlberger and Nick Webb, we received a National Science Foundation research grant to investigate the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies and deliberative processes to improve the federal agency rulemaking process.
The project is working the Federal Communications Commission, the Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency on rule makings for which they are seeking public comment. We recruiting interested citizens to participate in an online deliberation for 2 weeks on the rule making, and then submitting summary documents to the government agencies. We are experimenting with the utility and efficacy of deliberation to improve the opinion repertoire of the participants on the complexity of the rulemaking and other outcome measures. We are also using NLP technologies to create a digital facilitation agent that summarizes the discussions, introduces new topics or issues that have not yet been considered, and other deliberation facilitation tasks, and measuring the utility and effects of the facilitation agent. We are measuring the deliberation process and the arguments produced during the deliberations, using both NLP technologies and human coders, in an effort to measure the rationality and the process of the deliberations.
Political Deliberation and Expression of Disagreement
Much of my research the past few years has focused on the process and qualities of deliberation in formal deliberations. Using the coding scheme I developed to assess the quality of online discussion, I’ve measured the effects of expressions of agreement and disagreement during the deliberations on perceptions of the deliberation experience: satisfaction with it, a willingness to do it again, and the like. With Peter Muhlberger, we found that there is a relationship, with combinations of high levels of disagreement and low levels of agreement having a positive relationship with satisfaction and low levels of disagreement and high levels of agreement having a positive relationship with satisfaction. With two graduate students here at UAlbany, Mike Mussman and Lauren Bryant, we’ve also compared expressions of disagreement during deliberations that occurred online in synchronous chat and face-to-face. I also have a strong interest in creating visual representations of the deliberation process. With Alexis Wichowski, a doctoral student in the Informatics Ph.D. program, we hope to develop a way to track levels of participation during deliberations through visual display.
The 2008 Presidential Election
Political candidates have increasingly turned to the Internet to supplement their communication strategies. In prior years, I have studied what channels candidates use and which they avoid when campaigning through the internet, the use of weblogging technology in the political campaign of Howard Dean, and citizens' perceptions of candidate uses of new communication technologies.
This year, I am studying the CNN/You Tube debates, with the help of Lauren Bryant, with an eye to understanding the types of questions posed by citizens who submitted questions to You Tube as compared with more standard journalist questions.
I’m also interviewing staff members who worked on the presidential primary campaigns of Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2008 election so that I can understand how Web 2.0 technologies are changing the online political campaign.
I also plan to conduct a rigorous analysis of online, political discussion around the 2008 presidential general election.
Internet voting
I have been interested in the use of the Internet as a mechanism for voting since the Democratic primary in Arizona in 1998. I have written two papers on the subject. The first is a quantitative analysis that attempts to predict whether Internet voting will increase turnout that is scheduled to be published as a chapter in an edited book. The second is a qualitative analysis of people’s perceptions of Internet voting, which was published in the journal P.S.: Political Science, and is one of the top 50 downloaded articles.
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