Marc Smith

Biography
Marc Smith is a research sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities. He leads the at Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group which develops tools to support engagement in and the study of computer mediated collective action. He is the co-editor of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity, interaction and social order develop in online groups. Smith’s research focuses on the ways group dynamics change when they take place in social cyberspaces. Many groups in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: netscan.research.microsoft.com). Smith’s goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. He has developed a web interface (netscan.research.microsoft.com) to the “Netscan” engine that allows researchers studying Usenet newsgroups to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread length and frequency distributions of activity. This research offers a means to gather historical data on the development of social cyberspaces and can be used to highlight the ways these groups differ from, or are similar to, face-to-face groups. Smith is applying this work to a related study of graphical virtual worlds for Microsoft, contrasting the ways graphical systems differ from text-only systems. Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001.

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