(Image courtesy of edge.org) I finished my PhD at the MIT Media Lab this past summer and now I am a researcher at IBM. My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain. I am also interested in issues of online privacy. The results from the survey I did on Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability have been published here.
Watch her thesis defense in streaming video. Also, read/see a talk from IDEA 2006. See also here. See also: Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Information Visualization This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.
Fernanda Viegas | 
