Scott A. Golder
MIT Media Laboratory
Sociable Media Group

From Fall 2003 to Spring 2005, I was graduate student / research assistant in the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I worked with Professor Judith Donath.

I am currently a researcher at HP Labs in the Information Dynamics lab. I have a new webpage there. I also have a personal homepage at redlog.net.


While I was at the Media Lab, I had the good fortune to undertake a variety of interesting projects:
  • My thesis project, Webbed Footnotes, is on collaborative annotation for the web. I designed a system for annotating web documents and allowing others to provide feedback, promoting interesting or useful contribution. A free, public version will be available late Summer 2005.
  • In my poker research I explored how socially important information is transmitted through online interfaces. Poker is especially interesting, because instead of being a collaborative environment (which gets a great deal of attention), it is a competitive one. There are two webpages associated with my poker work: the general online poker research page, and the PokerFaces page, which is for the poker platform I built. A free, public version will be running mid-Summer 2005.
  • I spent a great deal of time exploring types of participation in electronic communities, especially Usenet and email-based discussion lists, and I am developing a social role-based method of analysis for online communities. My paper from AoIR on social roles sums up this work so far.
  • In Themail (with Fernanda Viegas), we studied the patterns in the conversations that take place in email over time.
  • Talking in Spaces - infusing notions of space and distance into mobile telephone conversations.
  • The Keep-In-Touch Phone - a persuasive mobile phone. My first venture into persuasive computing and into mobile phones.
  • NGDB: The NewsGroup DataBase - a fast, flexible usenet database supporting sociological analysis.

    Other areas of general interest include: social networks/capital (online and off), technology of the home and car, speech and natural language processing, online privacy, blogging, instant messaging, and wikis.

    From 1999 to 2003, I was an undergraduate in Linguistics at Harvard. While there, I created the Dialect Survey with my then-advisor, Bert Vaux. Here are the courses I took.

    Outside of my academic work, I've had a number of interesting jobs and internships. I developed mobile applications for ThinkingBytes (now Adesso Systems) from 2000 to 2002, and have spent summers working for giants Microsoft (doing speech recognition) and IBM (studying online communities).

    Classes
  • 15.576 - Research Seminar in Information Technology and Organizations: Social Perspectives (with Wanda Orlikowski)
  • STS 447 - Information Theory: Scientific Visualization (with Joseph Dumit)
  • MAS 965 - Techno-Identity: Signalling Identity in the Real and Virtual Worlds (with Judith Donath)
  • 4.208 - Designing Persuasive Environments and Technologies (with Stephen Intille)
  • MAS 741 - Context-Aware Computing (with Ted Selker)


    • Last updated: 14 July 2005