*
Quick Links|Home|Worldwide
Microsoft*
Search for



Danyel Fisher

Researcher
VIBE Group
Microsoft Research
danyelf@microsoft.com

My work emphasizes online communication with visualization techniques, social network analysis, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. I then use these forms of analysis to design systems that improve users' experience with computer systems. I have active projects looking at Usenet Newsgroups, redesigning email, and examining the usage of mapping systems. You can find me at CHI, CSCW, and InfoViz conferences.

I'm a member of VIBE, Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment,, a group interested in building new interfaces for computer systems and new ways of visualizing data. I have also been affiliated with the Community Technologies Group, which studies how groups of people do work together online.

I blog occasionally at "Made Out Of People".


Projects and Releases

Hotmap: the Use of Virtual Earth [Technorati]

Hotmap visualizes where in the world people look at when they use Windows Live Maps [Blogged].

MSR MapCruncher [Technorati]

MapCruncher places your maps on a Virtual Earth background, and lets you serve them up to the world. [Blogged].

Treemapper for Excel [Technorati]

MSR has released a number of public visualization components; we've now got a convenient tool for creating treemaps based on Excel data.[Blogged]

SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder [Technorati]

SNARF is a new way of handling email, and is now available as a public prototype. Check out the SNARF page to play with the public release.

The Roles Project

Did you just get an online reply from a flamer, or from a helpful answer person? Are you in a supportive discussion, or are you surrounded by flamers? The Roles project tries to figure out how different online groups differ from each other. ("You Are Who You Talk To")


Presentations and Invited Talks

Social Network Analysis: A Research Perspective (ppt). Invited panel presentation at the Politics Online 2007 Conference. Presents an overview of social network analysis, and contrasts the explicit relationships in social network systems like MySpace. Discusses "You Are Who You Talk To", "Picturing Usenet", and "Opinion Diversity" papers.


Selected Publications

Social Media (Blogs, Newsgroups, etc)

Gamon, M., Basu, S., Belenko, D., Fisher, D., Hurst, M., Konig, A.C. (2008) BLEWS: Using Blogs to Provide Context for News Articles. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (AAAI ICWSM 2008), Seattle, WA

Fisher, D., Turner, T.C., and Smith, M. (2008) Space Planning for Online Community. Proceedings of the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (AAAI ICWSM 2008), Seattle, WA

Geographic Visualization (Including Hotmap)

Elias, M., Elson, J., Fisher, D., Howell, J. (2008). "Do I Live in a Flood Basin?": Synthesizing Ten Thousand Maps. CHI 2008. Florence, Italy. (MapSynthesizer)

Fisher, D. (2007) How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps . Workshop paper, presented at the Imaging the City Workshop, CHI 2007.

Fisher, D. (2007) Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention . Proceedings of Information Visualization (IEEE InfoVis) 2007, Sacramento, CA

Visualization and Sociability

Fisher, D. (2006) Ask Not for Whom the Visualization is Rendered; It is Rendered for Thee. Workshop paper, presented at the Social Visualization Workshop, CHI 2006.

The Roles Project

Turner, T. C., Smith, M. A., Fisher, D., and Welser, H. T. (2005). Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 7. 

Fisher, D. Understanding Communication Using Social Networks. IEEE Internet Computing. September/October, 2005. [Local copy]

Fisher, D., Smith, M., and Welser, H. You Are Who You Talk To, Proceedings of HICSS, January 2006. (Best Paper, Digital Media and Communication Program) [Local copy]

Howard T. Welser, Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher,and Marc Smith. 2007. Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups. In Journal of Social Structure. (Vol. 8, No. 2)

Politics and Roles

Kelly, J., Smith, M., and Fisher, D. Opinion Diversity in Online Political Discussion Networks. Proceedings of Online Deliberation 2005 (DIAC-2005.) [Non-refereed. Local copy]

Kelly, J., Fisher, D., and Smith, M. Friends, Foes, and Fringe: Norms and Structure in Political Discussion Networks. Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Digital Government Research. [Poster. Local copy]

SNARF Research

Fisher, D., Brush, AJ., Gleave, E., Smith. M. Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "Email Overload" Ten Years Later. CSCW 2006. [Local copy]

Fisher, D., Hogan, B., Brush, AJ., Smith, M., and Jacobs, A. Using Social Sorting to Enhance Email Management. HCIC, the Human-Computer Interaction Consortium. 2006. [Local copy] [Slides]

Neustaedter, C., Brush, AJ., Smith, M., and Fisher, D.. The Social Network and Relationship Finder: Social Sorting for Email Triage. CEAS 2005. [Local copy]

Other Work

Fisher, D. (2007) On the "Diffusion of Innovations" in HCI. Thomas Erickson and David McDonald, eds. HCI Remixed. MIT Press.

Graduate Research: Soylent

Fisher, D. and Nardi, B. (2007) Soylent and ContactMap: Tools for Constructing the Social Workscape. Victor Kaptalenin and Mary Czerwinski, eds. Integrated Digital Work Environments. MIT Press.

Fisher, D. and Dourish, P. (2004). Social and Temporal Structures in Everyday Collaboration.  Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems CHI 2004 (Vienna, Austria), 551-558. [Local copy] [Copy at UCI]. [The dissertation from which it was extracted].


©2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Terms of Use |Trademarks |Privacy Statement