Research Group Projects and Descriptions

The Sociable Media group investigates issues concerning identity and society in the networked world. We address such questions as how do we perceive other people on-line? what does a virtual crowd look like? how do social conventions develop in the networked world? Our emphasis is on design: we build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated world.

Chat Circles is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous text conversation. Here, color and form are used to convey social presence and activity, and proximity-based filtering is used intuitively to break large groups into conversational clusters. The system also includes an integrated history interface, which visualizes archival Chat Circle logs. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions. We are currently revamping several of the chatroom's features to give our users more flexibility when setting up their own Chat Circles server.

Alumni Contributor(s): fveigas, Ethan Howe, Matthew Lee, Rodrigo Leroux, Ethan Perry and Joseph Michael Rozier

People use text to communicate in online spaces because of its directness and ease of use. However, we are unable to convey many social cues and communication nuances by text. We explore how to enhance the richness and expressiveness of text, so that we can have an expressive and intuitive online environment for textual communication. Cheiro is a chat space offering a novel form of gesture-enhanced textual communication over the Internet. It provides an intuitive interface for turning the form of text into an expressive visual medium; it is an experimental arena for exploring the relationships between gestures, emotions, and visuals.

Comment Flow is a flexible tool for the content-driven exploration and visualization of a social network. Building upon a traditional force-directed network layout, our system shows the activity and the information exchange (postings in the comment box) between nodes, taking the sequence and age of messages into account. This project serves both as an illustration of one approach to the general problem of individuated network visualization and as an example of the practical uses of such representations. By going beyond the “skeleton” of network connectivity and looking at the flow of information between the individual actors, we can create a far more accurate portrait of online social life.

We study different methods to depict the ways that people are spending their time in their lived environments. We look at people's relationships with each other in physical space through a variety of visualization techniques. By combining different sources of data from sensors, mobile phone logs, and other social media, we build rich and meaningful histories from the less-recognizable details of our lives to understand how our identities are shaped in time.

Echologue is a new kind of public space media for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. It can reflect its surroundings like a "smart mirror," highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment, and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. The interface senses ambient sound and deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output. The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural, and entertainment uses of public places and helps us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings.

Egology is a visualization of the daily rhythms of micro-blog postings. Micro-blog authors use mobile text messaging or Web interfaces to post short answers to the question "What are you doing?", creating a stream-of-consciousness account of their daily encounters, musings, plans, and actions. Using salient words and phrases from an individual’s postings, we visualize the topical and temporal patterns to create an abstract portrait of the author. Displayed as a group, these portraits both feature the individuality of each subject and highlight the external events that unite them.

In this project we present our exploration of several visualization techniques which use motion as the primary visual element for depicting online discussions. Visual attention appeals most strongly to motion. Since motion changes the immediate environment conditions, it is more likely than static visual cues to attract our attention. Motion is dynamic and vibrant; it is intuitive and suitable for representing large-scale online social data such as online discussions. Our designs and findings shed light on choosing the mappings between motion and social characteristics for creating intuitive and legible visualizations.

We are using signaling theory to explore how identity is presented and perceived in online environments. The fundamental idea is that many qualities we are interested in knowing about others are not directly observable. Instead, we rely on signals that are more or less reliably correlated with the quality. Sometimes signals are very reliable indicators of a particular quality, but sometimes they are not. The power of signaling theory is that it provides a means of evaluating the reliability of signals. We are using this approach to analyze social networking sites, reputation systems, graphical representations, and humanoid agents.

Medina is a social-networking site based around the idea of exchanging knowledge. The project explores new interfaces for visualizing connections between people and ideas. Knowledge and interests are valuable in and of themselves, but also provide useful structures for traversing the network. The site constantly measures the interactions between people and their interests in order to provide a more accurate picture of what relationships and information are important. The goal is to build an interface that more accurately represents the state of the network.

The rise in popularity of the Weblog, and the development of its many variants such as photoblogs, vlogs, moblogs, and tumblelogs, demonstrate that people are increasingly willing to share what they are doing, seeing, and thinking. Micro-blogging has opened this space up even further to those who would not at all consider themselves authors; services like twitter and the status updates common to social networking sites open up a form of publication that is well suited to this wide and fundamentally amateur audience. Mycrocosm is a Web service that uses the visual language of statistics to share even smaller chunks of personal information—individual numbers and words that are full of meaning in our lives—and allows users to track a wide variety of the minutiae of their daily lives to build up a rich online picture of the tiny things they find meaningful.

Pasts and Presents is a visualization of activity in a space, both current and in the past. The visualization is an abstract, animated image in which the movements of the elements are shaped by the actions of the people passing by; it is an abstract visualization in much the same way that ripples on a pond are a visualization of activity on and near the surface of the water.

We are using an online poker game as a platform for studying how people share and interpret non-verbal social information online.

Alumni Contributor(s): Scott Golder

PostHistory visualizes users' email mailboxes and the activity patterns within them. The idea is not to create yet another email reader, but instead is an attempt at making activity patterns within one's email account visible and visually interesting. Some of the questions in the project are: how much email do you get on any given day?; how active are you in replying, deleting, or moving messages around?; and how different does your mailbox activity look from someone else's?

Signs is an expressive instant messaging (asynchronous chat) client. Working under the guise of semiotics, Signs expands the communicative ability of users to emit iconic (pictorial) and indexical (referencing, highlighting, or modifying existing text) signs, in addition to the purely symbolic (text) signs that are used in instant messaging today. The additional channels reduce ambiguity in chat, provide a non-linear time structure, and yield new expressive means.

We are designing new forms of situated displays and interfaces embedded in public spaces. Our current focus is on interfaces that can function as social sensors, capturing the dynamics of people in different locations. We design applications that engage with users with alternative models of input for content generation that foster collective behavior in public.

As virtual environments become more widely adopted for different tasks, it is critical that we develop techniques for designing spaces and interfaces that clearly suggest certain kinds of behavior for users, both in virtual environments and for people who interact with a virtual environment through a mixed-reality boundary. To explore these issues, we have designed and deployed a mixed-reality table soccer game in which teams of players—real and virtual—use two different interfaces to play a soccer-like game together.

Alumni Contributor(s): Orkan Telhan

Like many institutions, MIT is thinking about how to involve the MIT community in its space in Second Life. The Projects is a collaborative building system in Second Life, consisting of configurable pods owned by MIT community members that connect together into a high-level structure. The design of these pods and their interconnection has a number of important challenges unique to working in a three-dimensional, virtual environment like Second Life: presence, history, search, and navigation. Based on sensors embedded in the pods and rules about how pods can be connected, we can provide socially based services that will form the backbone of this virtual architecture.

Themail visualizes the content of a person's email archive over time. The project focuses on the unique content found in interactions between the owner of the email archive and each contact.

The Transformative Copy Suite is a pair of applications that deal with the social history and evolution of media files. The first, Infinite Animation, is an exquisite-corpse style collaborative animation tool that allows users to collectively generate and revise an open-ended animation consisting of drawing and text; the second, Remote Whistles, is a mobile music project where users can record audio files with their cell phones and pass them on to friends. Each recipient can remix or rerecord parts of the piece.

Because we live in a three-dimensional world, it's tempting to translate directly the spaces in which we live and work to virtual, three-dimensional spaces. While these translations are usually quite legible—if a space looks like its real-life equivalent, its use is quite obvious—we believe that such translations don't take advantage of all that three-dimensional worlds have to offer. We are designing meeting spaces for Second Life that take full advantage of the features that set it apart both from other mediated environments and real-world meeting rooms. We hope that these meeting spaces will be useful tools in their own right, as well as providing a framework for the design of future interactive spaces in virtual worlds.

Social Networking Services (SNS) such as MySpace and Facebook are increasing in popularity. They encourage and enable users to communicate with previously unknown people on an unprecedented scale. Now our increased social sphere is requiring us to potentially distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate strangers. Automatically rejecting 'unwanted' messages has long been the function of spam filtering; however, as we move from Viagra ads in email to Betty the saleswoman in SNS, identifying a nuisance requires placing value judgments. Nuisances take the shape of legitimate social humans and commercial entities, and sometimes both—what is Britney Spears? We seek to redefine spam and how people are labeled more in the context of SNS by looking at users as prototypes.

VisualCV is an iconic representation of a person's career, exposing spatio-temporal patterns such as relocations and changes of position, and context information such as a person's impact on her environment. Similar to Tufte's "Sparklines," the visualization does not use an expicit metric, but instead suggests trends and shows patterns. At an individual level, this graphic representation has few advantages over a traditional CV; instead, it is meant for overview and comparison of a large number of CVs—with hundreds of applications, patterns become immediately visible.

Webbed Footnotes is a Web annotation system that enables users to have a discussion about, around, and within the space of a Web page. Webbed Footnotes' approval-based moderation system promotes contributions that other users find useful and interesting.