Intel Funds Ground-Breaking Social Computer Center in School of Literature, Media, and Communication

In a paradigm-breaking approach, Intel has announced a new Intel Science and Technology Center for Social Computing (ISTC-Social) involving the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts as a research partner supported by $1.625 million in funding.  Intel’s commitment affirms liberal arts-based research as a leading edge for third-wave computing.

“This is really quite daring,” said Carl DiSalvo, associate professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts School of Literature, Media, and Communication, which houses one of the nation’s top graduate programs in digital media.  “The research convention has been to create a technology and then find a use for it.  ISTC-Social shifts that to the innovation occurring in the humanities and social sciences. We begin with cultural and societal analysis, imagine social contexts or societal goals, and those become the driver for creating technology.”

Intel CTO, Justin Rattner, announced the new center June 26 during the annual Research at Intel event. This is the third ISTC at Georgia Tech.  Faculty in the College of Computing are part of ISTCs for Embedded and Pervasive computing.  ISTC-Social is the first Intel-academic collaboration to span technology, social sciences and humanities. The premise is that technology, culture, politics and computing are inextricably intertwined and so are essential to study in amalgam.

“This type of innovation at the crossroads of humanities, social sciences and technology has been a hallmark of liberal arts at Georgia Tech,” said Ian Bogost, professor of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication Graduate Program in Digital Media.  “ISTC-Social will further enable our research on completely novel forms of social computing.”

DiSalvo, Bogost and colleague Christopher Le Dantec will partner with researchers at Intel and the ISTC-Social hub at the University of California, Irvine, as well as with faculty in centers at Cornell, Indiana and New York Universities.  The work will converge across informatics, anthropology, communication, digital humanities, cultural studies, science and technology studies, media studies, philosophy, computer science and design.  The Georgia Tech center will lead research on Creativity and Collectivity, specifically, how group production and ‘patterns of making’ are changing what it is to be creative. 

“One future of media is social, and people in humanities and social sciences understand what makes things social,” said DiSalvo. “Third-wave computing is moving us from the era of one person using one device, to massively networked, mobile and cloud computing, but it is the liberal arts-based exploration of how we use those technologies that will really reinvent the future.”

Colatrella and Murray Named Associate Deans for Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

Dean Jacqueline J. Royster has named Carol Colatrella as Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Janet Murray as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs.  Both are professors in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC).

The appointments restructure responsibilities previously combined under the position of Associate Dean for Research/Faculty Development, a role held by Susan Cozzens, who moved to the position of Georgia Tech Vice Provost of Graduate Education and Faculty Affairs on June 1.

Carol Colatrella - Associate Dean for Graduate Studies

Dr. Colatrella is a two-time Fulbright scholar and an award-winning teacher who is active in programmatic and administrative roles both on campus and externally.

She is a long-time co-director of the Georgia Tech Center for the Study of Women, Science, and Technology (WST), which is part of the Office of the Vice President for Institute Diversity. WST sponsors technical and scholarly presentations, career development workshops, and focused research programs, and coordinates mentoring networks for faculty and students, including the WST Learning Community.  From 2005 to 2007, she served as program director of the Georgia Tech-National Science Foundation ADVANCE Institutional Transformation program.

Colatrella received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. Her research ranges across nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and European literary, historical, and scientific narratives, particularly those emphasizing moral transgression and social marginality.  Her scholarly work is strongly interdisciplinary and has been funded by national and international foundations. She held Fulbright fellowships based in Denmark in 2000 and in 2005-06, during the latter working with an international group of scholars. Other fellowships include a Nunn School European Union Center Grant for 2010-11 and a residency at Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin in June 2008. Colatrella has co-edited two books and authored and/or co-authored 35 book chapters and articles and three books, most recently Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology (The Ohio State University Press, 2011).

Since 1993, she has served as executive director of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. She is a manuscript reviewer for a number of journals, including the Journal of Narrative Technique, the Journal of Technology Transfer, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and for presses, including the University Press of Florida and the Modern Language Association. 

Colatrella was recognized in 2007 with Georgia Tech’s Geoffrey G. Eicholz Faculty Teaching Award and in 2005 with Georgia Tech’s Outstanding Service Award. She supervises graduate research assistants and undergraduate research projects. 

Janet Murray - Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs

A primary focus for Janet Murray as Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Affairs will be to cultivate and mentor faculty research and foster connections with research efforts in other Georgia Tech colleges.  She will work to further expand Ivan Allen College’s top-ranked $6M annual portfolio in humanities and social sciences sponsored research.

An IAC Dean’s Professor, Murray is a prominent scholar in the field of digital media and the application of digital technology in education, scholarship, entertainment, and art.  She directed LMC’s top-ranked Graduate Program in Digital Media from 1999 through 2011, during which she established the program as a national and international curricular model for a humanistic approach to the design of digital media.

During the course of her career, Murray has secured more than $4.5 million in research funding by a wide range of private and public sources including IBM, Apple Computer, the Annenberg-CPB Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation.  Through the Experimental Television Laboratory which she directs, Murray has developed research partnerships with PBS, ABC, MTV, Turner, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel Corporation, the American Film Institute and other media innovators. She is a member of the interdisciplinary GVU Center and has worked closely with researchers at GTRI, GCATT, and in the College of Engineering where she was co-PI on an NSF project that created innovative computer-based exercises for learning Statics.

Murray holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, and before coming to Georgia Tech taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects at MIT.  Her books Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, and Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (both published by MIT Press) are widely used as foundational texts in media studies and HCI.

She is a member of Georgia Tech's interdisciplinary GVU Center. She helped develop Georgia Tech’s program in Women in Science and Technology and supported implementation of the ADVANCE program on campus.  She has served on the IAC Dean’s Promotion and Tenure Committee and the Provost’s Task Force for Interdisciplinary Study. From 2000-2009, she served as a trustee of the American Film Institute and is currently on the board for the George Foster Peabody Award. In 2010 Murray was named one of the "Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future" by Prospect Magazine.

Dr. Murray assumed her new role July 1st. Dr. Colatrella will began in her new position August 15th. 

Siri, Take This Down: Will Voice Control Shape Our Writing?

The following article by Robert Rosenberger, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, was published in The Atlantic on August 1, 2012.

In the future, you will talk to your computer. Voice, the predominant mode of human-to-human communication, has been migrating to silicon for more than a decade and is now poised to hit the mainstream. 

Already, voice interfaces have become commonplace in the telephone customer-service industry, have long been of assistance to the blind, and are increasingly used by doctors for transcribing patient information. Even your less-tech-savvy relatives may have seen, for example, the recent profile of Nuance Communications in the New York Times. Nuance is the big fish in the small pond of dictation programming development, and the force behind Dragon, the highly-regarded though still expensive dictation-software package, as well as Siri, the iPhone 4S personal-assistant application, and the Ford "Sync" system's voice-command interface.  Google's concept video for "Project Glass" includes voice-to-text translation. 

So it seems as though our voices may some day displace our keyboards and mice as the primary means through which we manipulate our computing devices. But while to command by voice is one thing, to write by voice is another, and the question remains whether -- or how -- this shift in technology will shape the words we "pen."

The relationship between writing technology and writing itself is by no means clear, but we can look to history for insights into past shifts in popular writing tech. For example, in a series of lectures in the 1940s philosopher Martin Heidegger fretted over the growing influence of the typewriter:

"In the time of the first dominance of the typewriter, a letter written on this machine still stood for a breach of good manners. Today a hand-written letter is an antiquated and undesired thing; it disturbs speed reading. Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing provides this "advantage" that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The typewriter makes everyone look the same."

If the shift from handwriting to typewriters raised such concerns, what of the shift to computers? Though the keyboard was more or less the same, would the distinctions of computerized word processing shape writing in subtle ways? Susan Sontag thought no, that computers were much the same as typewriters. She explained, "Someone was marveling that I moved with so much pleasure to the word processor. And I said, 'The leap is from writing by hand to the typewriter. From writing with a typewriter to using a computer is no leap at all.' " But for Joan Didion, the particularities of the computer did seem in some ways distinct from her typerwriter, and more efficient to boot. She said:

"I use an IBM Thinkpad. I just use it like a typewriter, but when I started using it in 1987, I thought I won't be able to write anymore, so I thought I'd go back to the typewriter. But you couldn't go back to the typewriter after using the computer, so finally after about a month I got proficient enough that I could actually work on it without being distracted by it, and in fact then it started making me a whole lot more logical than I ever had been. Because the computer was so logical, it was always right, I was wrong ... and the time saved."

Other writers have observed that efficiency and opted against it. For example, biographer David McCullough prefers a vintage typewriter, reasoning that, "I don't want to go faster. If anything, I probably ought to go more slowly... When rewriting, I'm not just typing it all over again, I'm thinking through it again, rethinking, rewording where need be, saying it a little differently on second thought." That is, a disadvantage that comes with the time saved by computerized writing is that it discourages the moments of contemplation afforded by less efficient writing technologies. 

Two important points emerge from these snippets from the history of reflection on writing technologies. First, writing technologies do not by themselves appear to compel us to write or think in one way or another. It seems at least possible to express the same general thoughts with a pen, typewriter, or word processor. 

Second, and at the same time, these technologies do have some influence on our writing and thinking. Writing technologies appear to incline certain styles, disincline others, lean authors toward more or less reflectivity, and supply both conveniences and inconveniences. As Nietzsche said, "Our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts."

So discussions of how our method of writing affects our writing are nothing new. As we begin to think about how a future of dictated writing will look, we should keep in mind that dictation is nothing new either, and we can look to the past for evidence about what dictated writing will be like. For example, Milton was blind by the time he wrote Paradise Lost and is said to have composed the entire epic through dictation. A discussion has emerged over the later writing of Henry James, incited by the expansive biographical work of Leon Edel, about whether changes in James' style are attributable to a move to dictation. And Amy Rowland has recently argued -- based on her own experience taking dictation for journalists and also on accounts of historical figures such as Dostoevsky's "collaborator" (and, later, wife) Anna Grigorievna -- that there are substantial differences between a responsive human transcriptionist and automated dictation software. Rowland claims, "past authors have dictated to humans and their corporeal responses have contributed to aesthetic production, if in untraceable ways."

The recently released first volume of the "complete and authoritative" Autobiography of Mark Twain provides a rich example. Twain eschewed the conventional autobiographical format of simply recounting major events in more or less the order in which they occurred in life, and he instead jumped from story to story, entertaining each only so long as it held his attention. He argued that this would lead to a fresher and more truthful portrait. And he found that traditional writing with pen and paper did not lend itself to his preferred autobiographical form, explaining that, "With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly, smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish. It is too literary, too prim, too nice; the gate and style and movement are not suited to narrative." It's striking just how opposite Twain is to Heidegger here. For Twain, the truthfulness and authenticity of an autobiographical account would actually be hindered by the formality and lingering pace of handwriting. He took to speaking his stories to transcriptionists, claiming, "One would expect dictated stuff to read like an impromptu speech -- brokenly, catchily, repetitiously, & marred by absence of coherence, fluent movement, & the happy things that didn't come till the speech was done -- but it isn't so." However, some critics have pointed to this unfocused, meandering, and perhaps self-indulgent style as exactly the central drawback of the work.

One circumstance that may arise in a future in which computerized dictation has become the default means of writing is a general decline in our ability to compose formal long-form written works. Since in this imagined future all everyday writing -- personal and occupational -- is performed through computerized voice-to-text translation, people may achieve a level of writing proficiency that reflects only their extemporaneous speech. That is, we may come to write only as well as we talk. (This will of course not be the case for everyone. Professional writers, such as journalists or public relations specialists, will continue to write as formally and carefully as the task demands, and would abandon dictation if it proves to be poorly suited for the job, or, more likely, would take up a kind of typing/dictation hybrid.)

An analogous issue today is the concern sometimes raised about the effects of the Internet on reading skills. Critics contend that Internet reading is characterized largely by skimming and divided attention. And they argue that since we nowadays do so much of our reading online, we are being retrained as poor and distracted readers. In a similar way, by writing mainly through speaking to dictation technologies, everyday writers will be retrained to write in only the more casual manner in which they talk.

In some ways we are now entering the reverse of the process that Plato discussed in his dialogue the Phaedrus, as he imagined what it may have been like for those people, ancient to him, who were around when writing itself was new. He considered the disadvantages that come with the practice of writing, for example, critiquing the written word for causing forgetfulness by providing a way to record things that we would otherwise actively work to remember. Plato's larger criticism of the written word is that it fails to meet what he thought was the ideal method for investigation and learning, namely, critical back-and-forth discussion. He claims that once ideas are written down, "they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves." That is, written words cannot answer any questions, clarify themselves, or respond to challenges. Thus, in Plato's view, writing is a less ideal way for teaching and for investigation than active conversation. 

In the case of voice-to-text technologies, however, all writing becomes a kind of rehearsal for verbal interaction. In this light, an important effect of computerized dictation technologies is that they could lead people to become more skillful speakers, and thus more thoughtful participants in meaningful discussions. If writers of the future are composing text almost exclusively through computerized dictation, then they may become more thoughtful and nuanced speakers in the process. That is, the effect of dictation technologies may not be just on our writing, but that they may train us to be better verbal communicators, not just with our machines but with our fellow humans too.

Four Telltale Signs of Propaganda on Twitter

As Election Day 2012 draws nearer, the “Twitterverse” promises to light up again and again with explosions of political opinion. But which tweets are the genuinely expressed feelings of individual users and which are systematic disseminations of information meant to support or discredit an idea — the textbook definition of propaganda?

A new study by researchers at in the College of Computing and Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts calls such patterns of communication “hyperadvocacy.” The study identifies four characteristic behaviors of Twitter hyperadvocates, whose actions clearly separate them from the tweeting behavior of typical users. Hans Klein, associate professor in the School of Public Policy, worked on the study which was directed by Nick Feamster, in the College of Computing, and former postdoctoral researcher Cristian Lumezanu.

The study examined tweets from two recent politically charged U.S. events: the 2010 U.S. Senate race in Nevada and the 2011 debate over raising the U.S. debt ceiling. Collecting tweets that used the hashtags #nvsen and #debtceiling, the researchers were able to gather approximately 80 percent of all tweets on those issues during the time frame under study. From a dataset of nearly 100,000 tweets for the two issues combined, Feamster and his colleagues identified the following behaviors that characterize propagandistic activities on Twitter by users on both sides of the partisan aisle:

1. Sending high volumes of tweets over short periods of time;
2. Retweeting while publishing little original content;
3. Quickly retweeting others’ content; and
4. Coordinating with other, seemingly unrelated users to send duplicate or near-duplicate messages on the same topic simultaneously.

“As social media become more and more ingrained in our culture, and as people use social media more as a source of information about the world, it’s important to know the provenance of that information—where it’s coming from and whether it can be trusted,” Feamster said. “As a user, you might think the information you see is coming from lots of different sources, but in fact it can be part of an orchestrated campaign.”

Indeed, the very aspect of Twitter that makes it appear less amenable to traditional propaganda also makes it difficult to address with traditional content analysis techniques. Historically researchers could sift through the content of major media vehicles (The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, for instance) looking for “extreme” language, but such methods are often rendered meaningless in the world of social media where the huge number of users makes it nearly impossible to identify a baseline “standard” language.

“Twitter is a sort of ‘extreme democracy’– everyone’s a publisher, and people can say whatever they want with no rejection or limit. It’s complete freedom of expression,” said Lumezanu, now a researcher at NEC Laboratories America in Princeton, N.J. “We had to come up with a way to identify hyperadvocate behavior that didn’t try to politically valuate content, because in Twitter the content often can be misleading.”

Rather than identify propaganda-like communication by focusing on content, Lumezanu proposed examining behavior instead. The term “hyperadvocacy” is politically neutral and refers simply to those users and content that are consistently biased toward a specific point of view, without necessarily having a malicious or subversive intent. Starting with the tweets from users whose political stance was clearly known (such as public figures), the researchers used existing algorithms that rely on examining retweeting patterns to determine clusters of users with similar political ideologies. Then they identified as hyperadvocates those users who retweeted predominantly messages of users in the same cluster. These users consistently demonstrated the four characteristic behaviors described above.

In short, the study provides solid preliminary evidence in social media for the kind of message influencing that has long been known to exist within traditional media. Some messages were repeatedly retweeted, creating an echo chamber effect that increased the perceived legitimacy of the positions advocated in those tweets. Researchers also found some differences in tweeting behavior between the two issues under study. For example, the Nevada Senate race had a smaller number of individual tweeters but a relatively larger number of high-volume tweeters, whereas hyperadvocacy in the debt-ceiling debate was affected through more widespread retweeting of low-volume users.

“We rely on media to serve as our window on the world, but media can also distort what we see. It can act as a lens or as a filter, enlarging some topics and minimizing others,” said Klein, who directs the Internet and Public Policy Project. “Such media effects have long been studied in the mass media. This research looks for similar propaganda-like effects in new media like Twitter.”

The study is described in the paper “#bias: Measuring the Tweeting Behavior of Propagandists,” which Lumezanu will present at the 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM ’12), to be held June 4-6 at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

International Panel Recommends Formula for Science Allocation Funding

An international expert panel has recommended that allocations for science funding be based upon a combination of performance indicators and expert judgement, rather than by metrics alone.

The panel’s report, Informing Research Choices: Indicators and Judgement, provides an in-depth analysis of the evidence relevant to science indicators and also examines science assessment practices used by funding agencies around the world.  

“The report makes a positive statement on the ways indicators can be used in conjunction with expert judgment in the program evaluation process,” said Susan E. Cozzens, professor in the School of Public Policy and director of the Technology Policy and Assessment Center, who was one of the sixteen panelists. “The catalogue of indicators provided has been vetted with the world’s experts and should prove widely useful.”

The panel was convened by Council of Canadian Academies at the behest of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) which spends approximately one billion dollars a year on scientific research. The objective was to examine concerns that funding decisions made based upon historical funding patterns are not the best way to determine future funding decisions.

Download the report released to the public July 5, 2012. 

Nersessian book Selected APA 2012 William James Book Award

Science as Psychology: Sense-Making and Identity in Science Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2011) by Dr. Nancy Nersessian and co-authors has been awarded 2012 William James Book Award.

A Regent's Professor of cognitive science in the School of Public Policy and the College of Computing, Nersessian co-wrote the book with members of her research group: Lisa M. Osbeck and Kareen R. Malone at the University of West Georgia and Wendy C. Newstetter in biomechanical engineering at Georgia Tech.

The book reveals the complexity and richness of rationality by demonstrating how social relationships, emotion, culture, and identity are implicated in the problem-solving practices of laboratory scientists. A co-winner of the 2012 award, the book was recognized for its "scope and breadth in approach to a new conceptualization and application of general psychology."

Sponsored by Society for General Psychology Division I, the William James Book Award honors books that integrate material across psychological subfields or provide coherence to the diverse subject matter of psychology. Nersessian will make an award presentation at the APA (American Psychological Association) convention in Hawaii 2013.

Sam Nunn Elected to Hess Corporation Board of Directors

Hess Corporation announced the election of former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, to its Board of Directors. 

Senator Nunn is co-chairman and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a charitable organization working to reduce the global threats from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. He has continued his service in the public policy arena as a distinguished professor in The Nunn School and as chairman of the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is also a board member of The Coca-Cola Company and General Electric Company. Hess Corporation is a leading global independent energy company engaged in the exploration for and production of crude oil and natural gas, as well as in refining and in marketing refined petroleum products, natural gas and electricity. 

Public Policy Alumna Named Interim President of South Carolina State University

Cynthia Warrick, alumna of the School of Public Policy, became interim president of South Carolina State University on July 1.

“I have an entrepreneurial approach to higher education and I’m very secure in my abilities to raise funding to develop the types of programs needed to move South Carolina State University forward,” Warrick said in a news release.

She replaced acting President Rita Teal. “Dr. Warrick is highly qualified and will bring new energy and creativity to S.C. State University,” said John H. Corbitt, acting chairman of the board.

A native of San Antonio Texas, Warrick earned a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from Howard University, a master’s degree in public policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a doctorate in environmental science and public policy from George Mason University.

As a senior fellow in the Howard University School of Pharmacy Center for Minority Health Services Research, Warrick developed research proposals, mentored faculty and students, participated on search committees, recruited students, participated on federal advisory committees and reviewed grants for federal agencies. She also published two research papers, facilitated panels at national conferences and participated on the Middle States Accreditation reviews for two major universities’ five-year periodic review.

Prior to her research scholar appointment, Warrick served as tenured full professor of pharmacy, and dean and chief research officer at Elizabeth City State University, as associate professor and director of Environmental and Occupational Health at Florida A&M University, and assistant professor in the Division of Management, Policy and Community Health at the University of Texas School of Public Health, Center for Health, Promotion and Prevention Research.

Civil War History Class Enjoys Field Trip to Chickamauga Battlefield

The Callahan Leadership Fund enabled  professor Sy Goodman and graduate student John Miller to bring together members of their “Military History of the Civil War” class for an all-day field trip to study the Chickamauga campaign and battlefield near Chattanooga, Tennessee on June 30, 2012.

Temperatures over 100 degrees didn't deter the group from touring the battlefield. This year marks the 150th anniversary year of the war.  Members of the Civil War Round Table of Atlanta accompanied the group.

“This trip was awesome!  I never dreamed I would get to go on such an incredible field trip,” said INTA student Juliana Crim. “This will be the highlight of my time at Georgia Tech!”

The Callahan Leadership Fund was established to stimulate research and education related to global technology and national security.

IAC Faculty and Students Are Blogging

Georgia Tech Amplifier

Faculty in Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts are commenters on the GT current events blog. Here are some of our experts who've posted:

School of Economics
Danny Boston, Christine Ries

School of History, Technology, and Society 
Jennifer Singh

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
John Garver, Margaret Kosal, Lawrence Rubin

School of Literature, Media, and Culture
Philip Auslander, Ian Bogost, Carl DiSalvo, Janet H. Murray, Lisa Yaszek

School of Public Policy
Marilyn Brown, Robert Rosenberger

Catch up with IAC Students on the Liberal Arts Summer 2012 Blog

IAC students shared their research and experiences in Europe, China, and the U.S. West Coast.

Check Out More IAC Blogs