David McDonald

Community Through Pictures

Biography
Dr. David W. McDonald joined The Information School faculty in January 2002. His main research focus is collaboration and technologies that support collaborative activity. He has active research projects on visual blogging, collaboration with digital ink, and community wireless technology. He has published research on collaborative authoring, recommendation systems, organizational memory, and public use of large screen displays. His research falls in the areas of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). David earned his Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine in 2000. He previously worked at FX Palo Alto Laboratory and AT&T Labs.

Position Paper
Blogging has recently exploded in popularity. While blogging is mostly about text, some blog sites have developed virtual communities through pictures. Traditional studies of online interaction and collaboration often rely on text. The project described here takes a different analytic approach. The focus is on the images that individuals use to present themselves and interact with each other in a virtual community of pictures. In this approach, text is viewed as a supplement to the pictorial activity and interaction.

The pictures posted by participants have several interesting characteristics. The main content of a picture is often the individual participant, but the content can include friends, significant objects (possessions), or places that the participant visited, among other things. As well, the pictures often contain text titling and are sometimes heavily modified with Photoshop or other digital image manipulation software.

At times, one participant in a VBC will see a picture of another participant and respond. The response is not in text on the blog, but through the pictures posted on the site. A common example is that of “positional play.” Many of the web sites that support a VBC use web pages arranged as a grid of participants’ pictures (e.g., rows and columns of pictures). Positional play relies on this design and the ‘neighborness’ of one or more pictures in the grid. A participant will take a picture of herself looking or pointing up or down, left or right, knowing that when the picture is viewed in relation to another picture in the grid, it will create the image that the participant is “looking” or “pointing” at what the neighbor has done. Positional play is just one form of attempted interaction, a type of visual gesture or glance, captured in the context of juxtaposed pictures.

Interaction in a VBC is interesting because it represents a type of appropriation of inexpensive visual technology. Somehow we see and think we understand various forms of textual interaction; instant messaging, electronic mail, and discussion forums. But few of us are as facile with pictorial interaction. Few of us are able to interact through a sequence of pictorial turn taking to form a visual conversation. This study focuses on visual social interaction to understand how the participants have appropriated a technology to facilitate a new kind of visual community.

Back to Social Computing Symposium 2005