IN BRIEF

I received a Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 2012. I completed my dissertation work in the Speech + Mobility group with Chris Schmandt at the MIT Media Lab. I worked in the Sociable Media Group from 2006-2008. I'm interested in designing, building, and studying systems for technology mediated sociality.

You can reach me at dharry@media.mit.edu. My office is E15-354. See also, my blog about EVE Online, my last.fm, my twitter.

PAPERS / PRESS / PRESENTATIONS

show all ↓

DISSERTATION

We have long assumed that being face to face is the best environment for social interaction. But is "being there" the best we can aspire to? My dissertation describes projects that show how we can add mediated communication to face to face contexts in productive ways. (50MB PDF)

ROAR

ROAR is designed to allow very large groups of distributed spectators have meaningful conversations with strangers or friends while creating a sense of presence of thousands of other spectators.

TIN CAN CLASSROOM

A variant of the core Tin Can system designed to work in a seminar context where every student had their own iPad. Students could use the system both for taking personal notes as well as suggesting discussion ideas in a public pool of ideas. We conducted an in-class deployment and qualitative study.

In collaboration with Eric Gordon. Full paper at CSCW 2012.

4CHAN

We have a pretty good understanding of online spaces with pseudonyms and archives, but how might a community work that was fully anonymous where posts were ephemeral? In this paper we quantify and discuss the roles of anonymity and ephemerality on 4chan.org. (with MS Bernstein, A Monroy-Hernández, P André, K Panovich, and G Vargas. Won Best Paper at ICWSM '11. Lecture video.)

TIN CAN

Tin Can connects remote meeting participants and visualizes meeting processes on an iPad. The system collects and visualizes background tasks like taking notes, managing the agenda, sharing relevant content, tracking todos, and managing meeting process in a distributed interface.

BACKCHAN.NL

A web-based system for facilitating question asking and answering in conference situations. By putting question-asking on the web, it allows a remote audience to participate in the same way that the local audience does. Read more in our CHI paper. (slides)

With Joshua Green, Cherrie Yang, and Trevor Filter.

CONCH

In this project, we explore how a new currency for conversation might be added to audio conferences to provide a new channel for non-verbal communication.

REALITY PORTALS

A virtual world application that uses physical embedded sensor nodes with cameras and displays as portals between the real and virtual world. In collaboration with the Responsive Environments Group here at the Lab.

*SPACE

I've finished my thesis! Check it out here (24 Mb). It includes an extended discussion of *space as well as Information Spaces. My thesis also includes a broad theoretical discussion about the differences between virtual and physical spaces.

STIFF PEOPLE'S LEAGUE

A mixed reality table soccer game in which teams of virtual and real players compete. Debuted at Ars Electronica 2007. Read an overview here or view photos here. To appear in Homo Ludens Ludens in Gijon, Spain.

With Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan.
Video: (small, med, large)

INFORMATION SPACES

In this three dimensional social space, we use the design of the meeting space itself to give participants a vocabulary for responding to the meeting as well as a technique for visualizing the history of the meeting itself. Read more in our CHI paper.

INFORMATION AVATARS

I created an avatar that slowly grows out to connect with other avatars around it. Over time, these avatars' colors shift and change to become more like the colors of people near them, visualizing their relationships.'

THE PROJECTS

We propose an extensible cellular building structure that provides people with a space to work, play, and socialize. We also describe a set of "social utilities" to support effective navigation, self expression, and visualization.

With Dietmar Offenhuber.

TUG AND TALK

The Tug and Talk device sits on your belt and connects to your shirt. Another Tug and Talk user can tug on the chain coming out of their matching belt and their tugging pattern is replicated as a tug on your own shirt. Presented at alt.chi 2007.

With Matt Adcock, Matt Boch, Vanessa Harden, and Retro Poblano.

SOUSREALITY

"Sousreality" is a pair of connected spaces linked through the metaphor of a crystal ball. In the SIGGRAPH gallery is a crystal ball that peers into Second Life, and in Second Life there is a crystal sphere containing a real-time inside-out vision of the gallery.

With Dietmar Offenhuber and Orkan Telhan.

CHATTERPRINT

Chatterprint is a concept for a sharable visualization that describes the history of a single person's online life through a variety of media including like instant messaging, online forums and social networking sites. By combining a range of different sources, I hope to capture the rhythms and patterns of online life in a way that people feel creates a meaningful self-portrait that they would want to share with others.

BRIDGING WORLDS

An ethnography of World of Warcraft players, studying how relationships move between the real and virtual worlds. This work refutes the common misconception that virtual worlds are meritocratic spaces.

My humanities thesis while at Olin College.

TREE FLOW

A visualization technique for illustrating changes of tree data structures over time, for instance the organizational chart of a company.

With Martin Wattenberg while at IBM Research in Cambridge.

K-CLIQUE REDUCTION

A visualization technique for reducing the complexity of graph visualizations. Uses a fast heuristic to identify complete subgraphs and represents those subgraphs as visually distinct nodes. This system also describes a method for "eroding" nodes at the periphery of the graph to simplify the final representation.

With Dan Lindquist while at Olin College.