Current work
Social Software for Wellness
We are building and deploying a series of social software applications designed to support various aspects of wellness. This will help us learn more about best practices for adding social dimensions to these applications.
Our first application is Three Good Things. Participants in the Three Good Things positive psychology exercise (see Seligman et al 2005) list three positive events each day - big or small - and reflect on the reasons they occurred. This exercise has been shown to increase happiness and decrease symptoms of depression. We've created a Facebook app to support this exercise.
Munson, S; Lauterbach, D; Newman, M, Resnick, P. (2010). "Happier Together: Integrating a Wellness Application Into a Social Network Site," Persuasive 2010.
BALANCE: Enhancing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators
Aggregators such as Digg, Reddit, and Google News rely on ratings and links to select and present subsets of the large quantity of news and opinion items generated each day. The goals of this research are to: 1) form alternative measures of diversity for result sets; 2) develop algorithms for selecting result sets that jointly optimize for diversity and popularity; 3) assess the impacts of alternative selection and presentation methods on people's willingness to use an aggregation service, their exposure to diverse opinions, and the size of their argument repertoires. The results of the project will provide a better understanding of alternative notions of what it means for a set of items to be diverse, and the range of reactions that different people have to varying levels and presentations of diversity. This project is funded by NSF grant #IIS-0916099.
Munson, S; Resnick, P. (2010). "Presenting Diverse Political Opinions: How and How Much 
," CHI 2010.
Munson, S; Zhou, DX; Resnick, P. (2009). "Sidelines: An Algorithm for Increasing Diversity in News and Opinion Aggregators ," ICWSM 2009.
Munson, S; Zhou, DX; Resnick, P. (2009). "Designing Interfaces for Presentation of Opinion Diversity ," Extended Abstracts CHI 2009, Boston, Massachusetts.
Early byproducts of this work:
Online Political Discussions in Non-Political Spaces
Political theorists have articulated normative ideals for political deliberation. Theorists argue that democracy flourishes in societies where political discussion is frequent and frequently approaches these deliberative ideals: such societies will make better collective choice on important matters at all levels of government, and those choices will have greater public legitimacy.
I hypothesize that, although political discussion is less frequent in spaces where people have connected for non-political reasons, when it does occur the political discussion may be closer to deliberative ideals. People who have come together for a non-political reason may have diverse political views, and because they have existing relationships to protect, they may more open to other viewpoints and more willing to do the hard work of formulating their own opinions in ways that they think will appeal to others who do not fully share their own political outlook.
Wikis as a next generation FAQ
This work examines the interrelationship of collaborative authoring software (Wikis) and discussion software (forums, mailing lists, etc) in support communities. Wikis allow for knowledge generated by community members to be aggregated and accessed more efficiently than newsgroup or mailing list archives. Initial work included collection of best practices from one community that uses both wiki and email list channels. These results are presented in a 2007 ASIST paper.
Furnishing medical support communities with Wikis allows us observe how these communities adopt, populate, and maintain these tools. View the project site.
Hansen, D; Munson, S (2008). "Patient-Driven Content Creation: Effectively Introducing Wiki Repositories to Virtual Support Communities", Medicine 2.0, Toronto, Canada.
Hansen, D; Ackerman, M; Resnick, P; Munson, S. (2007). "Virtual Community Maintenance with a Repository ," ASIS&T 2007, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In a third setting, I examined use of a workgroup wiki in the enterprise. Workgroups can struggle with remembering past projects and sharing this information with other groups in the organization. In a case study of the deployment of MediaWiki as a publishing tool for building organizational memory, group members' motivation to document past projects increased. A browsable collection of past projects allowed for discovery of past work, building the reputation of individuals and the workgroup, and development of transactive memory within the workgroup. The "anyone can edit" feature, frequently touted as the main benefit of wikis, had both benefits and drawbacks in this implementation.
Munson, S (2008). "Motivating and Enabling Organizational Memory with a Workgroup Wiki ," Proceedings of the 2008 International Symposium on Wikis, Porto, Portugal.
Past projects
altVerto: Using interventions and community experiences to promote alternative transportation
We apply best practices in persuasive technology to increase use of alternative transportation. Our specific product idea resulted from analysis of contextual interviews and participant observation. For this product, we have completed paper and high fidelity prototypes as well as a field trial of our system. We are currently evaluating the feasibility of a broader field trial. This work won first place CHI 2007 student design competition. Project site.
Gukeisen, M; Kleymeer, P; Hutchful, D; Munson, S. (2007). altVerto: Using interventions and community experiences to promote alternative transportation. Extended Abstracts of CHI 2007, San Jose, CA.
Networked Cities and Urban Markup
Two projects exploring the intersection of urban environments and mobile devices. In the first short project, we propose a system for tagging strangers. Unlike many current people-tagging projects, this system does not help maintain existing interpersonal connections or to create new ones. There are two lasting artifacts created when a user tags someone else: the tag is added to the location's and the tag is stored to a profile for the user's location. This plays one people's questions about about what others are thinking of them and also creates a profile of spaces based on the people who are tagged within.
A description of the second project, WalkOn, can be found on my blog.
Internet Meetups and Community
Members of many websites that have forums or comment sections organize get-togethers, most commonly called meetups, with other members. These gatherings run against the trend, observed by Robert Putnam and others, of declining participation in community organizations such as bowling leagues, PTAs, VFW, and Kiwanis. Participation in this type of organization may indeed be slipping, but at least some people are participating in something else. The website meetups are as rich for their participants as the activities described by Putnam; they produce social capital among their members, and are ultimately an example of the ways in which the Internet enhances or even becomes community. The ties formed between website members and meetup participants can fit within a definition of community proposed by Wellman: "networks of interpersonal ties that provide sociability, support, information, a sense of belonging, and social identity." Separation of the idea of community from physically bounded neighborhoods and towns is also consistent with Wellman's idea of a "liberated community" and emerging models of network sociality and elective sociality, in which people are held together in social networks by their personal choices rather than pre-given relationships such as location or interest.
Munson, S. (2006). Internet Meetups and Community, 2006 Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium Student Conference, Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Optimizing Satisfaction in Group Formation
Some students have a strong preferences for teammates when it comes to class projects. Could we collect this data and then optimize the number of preferences met? Once enough people get involved, the problem turns out to be a satisfiability problem; it's NP Complete, so approximations must be made to deliver a good solution in a reasonable amount of time. We developed and tested a number of approximations in our project, and then took those approximations back to our classmates who told us how we did. With Grant Hutchins.
Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data
We present a novel application of NLP and text mining to the analysis of financial documents. In particular, we describe an implemented prototype, Maytag, which combines information extraction and subject classification tools in an interactive exploratory framework. We present experimental results on their performance, as tailored to the financial domain, and some forward-looking extensions to the approach that enables users to specify classifications on the fly.
Chang, C; Ferro, L; Gibson, J; Hitzeman, J; Lubar, S; Palmer, J; Munson, S; Vilain, M; and Wellner, B. (2006). Maytag: A multi-staged approach to identifying complex events in textual data, Conference of the European Chapter for Computational Linguistics, Trento, Italy.
Undergrad and masters projects
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