Research Tweets

Allison Druin, Associate Dean for Research, iSchool

Yes, on May 25, 2011, #HCIL was “trending” in the Washington DC area on Twitter (see screen grab by Jen Golbeck below).  What does this mean?  Amazingly for the first time in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s (HCIL) 28 years, so many of us were tweeting about the Lab’s Symposium on Twitter, we were among the top ten items people were talking about online in the Washington-area. Why care? Because more people than ever can now be a part of a research event through social media.

#HCIL Trending on Twitter in the Washington DC area, May 25, 2011

The Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL)  is the oldest HCI lab in the country, possibly the world.  The lab is incredibly interdisciplinary with faculty, staff, and students coming from 9 colleges and 2 institutes at the University of Maryland.  The lab is jointly administered by the iSchool, Computer Science Department, and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies.  Until a few days ago, I had the honor of being the lab’s Director for 5 years (I’m happy to say iSchool Faculty member, Jen Golbeck has taken over as the HCIL’s 4^th director).

Each year at the end of the spring, the lab shares its work through an annual Symposium .  This year we presented talks, demos, workshops, and tutorials on social network technologies, electronic health record informatics, interaction design and children, information visualization, consumer health informatics, and more.  People presented the technologies they built, or discussed the empirical work they’d done and the lessons they’d learned, or talked about the design methods they used to make the new technologies. (See picture of demo session) This year at the Symposium we had over 300 HCI-interested professionals flying in from the UK, China, Indiana, or taking the metro from Washington DC and more. While this was one of the largest Symposiums we’ve ever hosted at the University, we also had the largest virtual presence of participants with many who followed the Symposium’s happenings and discussions through tweets.

Demonstrations during the HCIL Annual Symposium

One our favorite tweets of the two days was from someone outside of the lab, Brian Danielak (otherwise known as @Capbri) a second-year Ph.D. student in Science Education in the College of Education at the University of Maryland.  He said in his 140 characters: "The #hcil has an astoundingly positive research culture. Why can't more academic research groups be like this?"  This tweet prompted Erika Shehan Poole (@verbicidal) an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University to ask, “What are some of the #hcil best practices for fostering positivity in research culture? help other groups learn!” What was so wonderful about this exchange is that Erica is someone entirely outside of our University and did not even attend the symposium, but was able to be a part of the discussion!

Well, Ben Bederson (@bederson), one of the former Directors of the HCIL did respond with 6 more tweets offering his suggestions for best practices:

“Best practices for #HCIL: Start by reading @benbendc '93 article - http://bit.ly/lFzV0e”

“Second: *always* treat colleagues with respect. Their successes are your successes. #HCIL”

“Third: critique with grace. Be honest, but no one should *ever* leave a meeting crying. #HCIL”

“Fourth: Focus your work on what you love. Life is too short to do what you *should* do. #HCIL”

“Fifth: Only hire people you want to have lunch with every day. #HCIL”

“Sixth: Marry your colleagues :) Our Fourth CHIple is joining #HCIL next year.”

The only tweet that was questioned was the number of married couples in the lab ;) It turns out we will have 5 married couples as of January (Ben Bederson and I are one of those couples).  If you want to see the some of the other backchannel tweeting, you can do so by searching for “#HCIL” on Twitter.  There you’ll find everything from pointers to articles that reporters wrote about our talks: “@lintool: This Is What a Sabbatical at Twitter Looks Like - @chronicle article: http://bit.ly/ivgCNJ #HCIL” to short descriptions of what was happening: “@cydparr: Morning of demos at #hcil open house. Quick GUI help scripting using screenshots, spatial ability & mobile apps, citation snippets & more” to kind words from our participants: “@ieleta: I wished for a longer EventGraph presentation by @shakmatt, so interesting! #hcil symposium” (see an EventGraph image that Derek Hansen presented below)

A Twitter EventGraph created in NodeXL that shows part of the Twitter conversation about the HCIL symposium. See http://casci.umd.edu/HCIL2011 for details

All in all, it was a wonderful way to continue the research excitement, the exchange of ideas, and enjoy the 28^th Annual HCIL Symposium. See you next year (at UMD or tweeting)!