Current 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.
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. CHI 2007, San Jose, CA.
CareWeb: Evaluation of a Web-based Patient Record System
We are currently evaluating CareWeb, an online patient-record system developed at the University of Michigan's hospital system. The system integrates records from caretakers with access to data collected from several other clinical systems to provide quick access to detailed patient information. We completed a generalized transition network (GTN), initial interviews, heuristic evaluation, and survey.
With Ayşe Büyüktür, David Hutchful, Cheng-Lun Li, and Rupa Patel.
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.
Evaluation of Basecamp
We evaluate Basecamp as a project management tool, using heuristic evaluation and case studies of actual users. Many of the challenges associated with groupware as identified by Grudin (1994) remain present in Basecamp and other project management software. While there have been some recent advances, more progress is needed before Basecamp and its competitors can effectively integrate with users' routines.
With Irene Cheung and David Hsiao. Final paper .
Traces: Location Based Services
Work with Motorola Labs to develop and deploy prototypes of social, location based services. Developed several initial storyboards and services which were evaluated in focus groups and structured interviews. Experience prototypes of the most promising were built and field tested with over 40 users. Also included work on recommender systems. With Adam Chasen, Michael Crayton, Sutee Dee, Drew Harry, and Kevin Tostado.
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.
Go Communities and the Internet
Researchers, notably Robert Putnam, have observed a decline in community involvement and link it to a drop off in engagement in clubs. Membership in American Go clubs has bucked the national trend and is rising. We use ethnographic methods to examine Go players and their interactions both online and offline in an attempt to understand the reasons for this membership increase. We also worked to determine if the Go players' interactions, either in person or online, were able to produce social capital.
Through interviews, participant observation, and analysis of player-created documents, we identified three areas that contribute in particular to Go's growth: characteristics of the game itself, opportunities for youth engagement, and complementary online tools. This has produced a community of practice, that both produces social capital and helps draw more people into Go. With Drew Harry.
Munson, S and Harry, D. (draft). Complementing, Not Competing: An Ethnographic Study of the Internet and American Go Communities.
Point of Sale System Redesign
Redesign the Olin College dining hall's point of sale system. We worked primarily on the interface within the computer, but soon learned that many of the common challenges faced by dining hall staff are with the limitations of the system, not its interface. Specifically, customers who pay with cash slow down lunchtime operations, and they are too often unable to provide cash customers with proper change. To solve this, we conceived of a temporary declining balance card -- much like the cards used in mass transit systems around the world -- to reduce the number of cash transactions.
One of the surprises during this project came when we added an "express lane" that would allow students on meal plans to swipe their cards at a separate card reader from the cashier, so they could avoid waiting in line behind people paying with cash. While students passing through an unmonitored line is not a problem at Olin, where the cashier station is often untended and students simply swipe themselves through, we were concerned about security at larger or more public food service operations. To increase security, we decided to display a ID picture of the student currently at the express lane so that staff members could visually check the ID. When the users at Olin noticed the picture, they were excited not for its security applications but because it would help them continue to learn students' names even if they skipped the cash line. With Sarah Oliver and Jerzy Wieczorek.
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.
Older projects (lots from undergrad)
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