Speaker: Justine Cassell, Professor, Northwestern University

Date: Wednesday, September 8, 2004 4:15-5:15p

Location: Cornell Information Science, 301 College Avenue, Seminar Room

Abstract -

"Digital divide" vs."melting pot", "great liberator" vs."social stratifier". In all of the rhetoric comparing Internet use among diverse populations, remarkably little attention has been paid to the voices of the users themselves. And yet, online discourse could provide a miraculous window into the processes of community formation when the members are vastly different from one another along the axes of age, culture, economic benefits, language, and other dimensions that would hinder if not prohibit communication in the physical world.
In this talk I will discuss one such online community designed to unite over 3000 young people from 139 countries, and the research analyzing their discourse over five years online. The participants, aged 10 to 16, spoke many different languages and represented a wide variety of economic and cultural backgrounds. The technological approach aimed at designing for the lowest common denominator, so that no child - regardless of bandwidth, language or platform - saw anything different than any other. Subsequent analysis of their online behavior has included quantitative and qualitative analyses of 20,000 e-mail messages, as well as questionnaires and extensive interviews with selected participants. From a technical point of view, I will discuss successes and failures in "designing to the lowest common denominator". From a social point of view, I will report on results that demonstrate the ways in which these boys and girls from very different cultural, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds increasingly converged as a community, and yet diverged as they maintained very distinct linguistic styles throughout.


Bio -

Justine Cassell is a full professor in the departments of Communication Studies and Computer Science at Northwestern University, the director of the ArticuLab research group, and the graduate director of the interdisciplinary Technology and Social Behavior Ph.D. program. Before coming to Northwestern, Cassell was a tenured associate professor at the MIT Media Lab where she directed the Gesture and Narrative Language Research Group. In 2001, Cassell was awarded the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award at MIT.
Cassell holds undergraduate degrees in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth and in Lettres Modernes from the Universite de Besançon (France). She holds a M.Phil in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and a double Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Linguistics and Psychology.
Cassell's research concentrates on better understanding everyday kinds of conversation and narrative as practiced by children and adults, and on building technologies that simulate, mediate, and facilitate those everyday kinds of talk. These technologies, such as Embodied Conversational Agents, Story Listening Systems, and Lowest Common Denominator Communities, in turn allow her to study the nature of human communication with and through technology.

If you would like to meet with Justine during her visit contact Anat Nidar-Levi.


For more information please contact Jeff Hancock.