Awards and Articles

Announcements

  • Kris M. Markman, membership co-chair for HCTD, will join the faculty of the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis in Fall 2007 as an assistant professor. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in Organizational Communication at Northeastern University in Boston, MA.
  • Ran Wei, U. of South Carolina, will be spending his sabbatical leave in the 2007-08 academic year as a Visiting Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.  

Honors, Grants, and Awards

  • Celina Pascoe has won the Gary F. Wheatley Award for Best Paper at the 11th International Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium 2006 held in Cambridge, UK in September. The Symposium is sponsored by the Command and Control Research Program from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense.

    • Pascoe’s paper examined management structures and organisational communication in the Australian Defence Force’s peacekeeping operations in Iraq and its humanitarian operations in Sumatra.  The paper is based on research that Pascoe conducted with the Defence Science and Technology Organisation of the Australian Department of Defence.

  • Professors Miriam Metzger and Andrew Flanagin from the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara were awarded $520,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to explore people’s understandings of credibility across the wide range of digital information resources available today. The working hypothesis of the project is that digital technologies have dramatically increased the burden on individuals to effectively seek, readily locate, and accurately assess the quality of information in their daily lives, for two reasons: (1) the availability of information has increased exponentially in recent decades due to networked digital technologies such as the Internet and the Web and,  (2) the proliferation of information sources has made traditional notions of who is an information authority increasingly dynamic and problematic. The research project will generate detailed interview, usage, and survey data, that will provide a wealth of information about how individuals seek, find, and use credible information today.

    • The MacArthur Series on Digital Media and Learning is a series of volumes that explore core issues facing young people in the digital world. You can view earlier online dialogues about the Series. The Series will be published in September 2007. There are six Series topics, and they include: civic engagement, credibility, ecology of games, innovative uses and unexpected outcomes, race and ethnicity, identity. For more information, please see: http://www.digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2029271/k.A7F2/MacSeries_Volumes.htm

    A list of volume editors is below:

    Civic Engagement
    Editor:Lance Bennett, University of Washington

    Credibility
    Co-Editors: Miriam J. Metzger, University of California at Santa Barbara and Andrew Flanagin, University of California at Santa Barbara

    Ecology of Games
    Editor: Katie Salen, The Parsons School of Design

    Innovative Uses & Unexpected Outcomes
    Editor: Tara McPherson, University of Southern California

    Race & Ethnicity
    Editor: Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Identity
    Editor: David Buckingham, University of London

Publications

  • Gong, L., & Nass, C. (2007). When a talking-face computer agent is half-human and half-humanoid: Human identity and consistency preference. Human Communication Research, 33, 163-193.

    • Do people differentiate digital humanoid entities from real-human ones? Using an inconsistency -effect approach, Gong and Nass in two experiments found people do differentiate, particularly among female users. Mixing a real-human face or voice with a computer-synthesized one causes distrust and longer processing time among both male and female users. Their article discusses the implications for computerized human characters, digital entertainment, and e-commerce.

  • Gong, L. (2007). Is happy better than sad even if they are both non-adaptive? Effects of emotional expressions of talking-head interface agents. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 65, 183-191.

    • When a digital character cannot dynamically detect emotional demands of the interaction context and thus cannot adapt its expression accordingly, would constantly happy expression be advantageous than constantly sad expression? Gong's findings seem to indicate "yes", in terms of effects on purchase intent in a simulated e-commerce context and social judgment of the agent character.  

  • Lo, Ven-hwei & Wei, Ran. (2006). “Perceptual Differences in Assessing the Harms of Patronizing Adult Entertainment Clubs,” International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 18 (4), pp. 475-487. 
  • Wei, Ran. (2006).”Wireless Telephony.” In A. Grant & J. Meadows (Eds.) Technology Update (10th Edition), London: Focus Press, pp. 311-324.
  • Wei, Ran. (2006). “Wi-Fi Powered WLAN: When Built, Who Will use it?” Journal of Computer Mediated Communicatio, 12(1), pp. 1-21.

  • David J. Gunkel, associate professor of communication technology at Northern Illinois University, has just published his second book.  It is called Thinking Otherwise: Philosophy, Communication, Technology, and it is part of the Purdue University Press series in communication and philosophy.  The book addresses the ethics of information and communication technology with special attention to questions of the other and otherness.   Information about the book, including an excerpt, is available at the following website: http://thinkingotherwise.org
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    Have you published recently?  Changed schools?  Earned tenure? Been awarded a grant? Please let Shannon or Rodney know by July 22.