The Communicative Practices in Virtual Workspaces (CPVW) lab in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering investigates emergent uses of digital technologies to coordinate work activities. The lab's work focuses on developing knowledge about novel applications and integration of digital technologies in the work of organizations — whether they are formal or ad hoc social networks. Adopting and extending ideas from human-computer interaction, technical communication, and related fields, the lab uses varied methods to explore communicative practices in virtual workspaces.
Current research topics include:
- Uses of shared web services to conduct distributed work
- Visualizations of work activity mediated by online contributor systems
- Automated detection of social behaviors based on language use
- Modeling communicative work in online systems