Judith S. Donath

We are looking to better enable cooperation between individuals working in the same domain yet having differing goals. Tools for collaborat…

Data portraits are a series of visualizations of information traces collected from various social application feeds. Using salient words an…

The rise in popularity of the Weblog, and the development of its many variants such as photoblogs, vlogs, moblogs, and tumblelogs, demonstr…

Medina is a social-networking site based around the idea of exchanging knowledge. The project explores new interfaces for visualizing conne…

Echologue is a new kind of public space media for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic featu…

While people attend presentations, panels, and lectures to learn something from the people at the front of the room, there's a lot of poten…

The Transformative Copy Suite is a pair of applications that deal with the social history and evolution of media files. The first, Infinite…

Comment Flow is a flexible tool for the content-driven exploration and visualization of a social network. Building upon a traditional force…

VisualCV is an iconic representation of a person's career, exposing spatio-temporal patterns such as relocations and changes of position, a…

We are designing new forms of situated displays and interfaces embedded in public spaces. Our current focus is on interfaces that can funct…

Pasts and Presents is a visualization of activity in a space, both current and in the past. The visualization is an abstract, animated imag…

We study different methods to depict the ways that people are spending their time in their lived environments. We look at people's relation…

People use text to communicate in online spaces because of its directness and ease of use. However, we are unable to convey many social cue…

Themail visualizes the content of a person's email archive over time. The project focuses on the unique content found in interactions betwe…

In this project we present our exploration of several visualization techniques which use motion as the primary visual element for depicting…

Webbed Footnotes is a Web annotation system that enables users to have a discussion about, around, and within the space of a Web page. Webb…

We are using signaling theory to explore how identity is presented and perceived in online environments. The fundamental idea is that many …

We are using an online poker game as a platform for studying how people share and interpret non-verbal social information online.

PostHistory visualizes users' email mailboxes and the activity patterns within them. The idea is not to create yet another email reader, bu…

Chat Circles is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous text conversation. Here, color and form are used to convey social presence …

Signs is an instant messenger design philosophy and implementation. It aims to reduce confusion while increasing expressive power through a…

Metropath(ologies) is an installation that immersively explores the experience of living in our increasingly information filled�and informa…

Much of the recent interest in virtual worlds has focused on using the immersive properties of virtual worlds to recreate an experience lik…

As virtual environments become more widely adopted for different tasks, it is critical that we develop techniques for designing spaces and …

Social media are becoming increasingly heterogeneous in nature and usage as online communication evolves. Understanding how communities use…

Social Networking Services (SNS) such as MySpace and Facebook are increasing in popularity. They encourage and enable users to communicate …

Mountain is a visualization of email that focuses on people instead of the messages they have exchanged. The project explores the ever-grow…

Fashion signals are important in displaying one�s quality of access to information. Electronic fashions (information that may circulate wit…

Like many institutions, MIT is thinking about how to involve the MIT community in its space in Second Life. The Projects is a collaborative…

Chatterprint creates visual and textual fingerprints of one or more instant message conversations. These sorts of visualization techniques …

Chit Chat Club is an experiment in bringing people together in both immediate and online spaces. It consists of a set of communication port…

Open Sources visualizes the roles and relationships among developers in free software communities. It is designed to help members of an ope…

Mediated communication between remote social spaces is a relatively new concept. One current example of this interaction is video conferenc…

We are developing a system that allows a group of distributed participants to direct the actions of a remote actor. This remote "TeleActor"…

NGDB is designed to be a fast, flexible database of Usenet newsgroup messages that supports a variety of applications, including visualizat…

Anthropomorphic visualization is a new approach to presenting historical information about participants in online spaces using the human fo…

Based on Karrie Karahalios' past work on visualizing Usenet newsgroups, Loom2 is a more extensive version, trying to explore visually the i…

This project explores how we can visually compare multiple newsgroups. We represent some of the implicit information about group communicat…

We describe a study of the impact of visual traces on the behavior of groups of users in Chat Circles, an abstract graphical chat room. The…

Carousel was inspired by Robert Morris's "The Finch College Project." In his installation, a film camera was placed on a platform that rota…

Social Network Fragments is interested in exploring the structure of an individual's social network. The relationship between actors in one…

The goal of this work is to create a communication link between disjoint public spaces for sociable casual conversation by combining the ea…

While instant messaging clients are frequently and widely used for interpersonal communication, they lack the richness of face-to-face conv…

Like the visible layers of a canyon, the layers in Artifacts of the Presence Era tell a story of past events. The images and sounds produce…

Online public discussion spaces such as Usenet news groups are rich social environments. The social dynamics within the community are not o…

In the online world, many of the social cues that are fundamental to coherent communication and the establishment of a vibrant community ar…

Memory is elusive and the need to hold onto its origins is always fleeting. This installation is designed as a stage in which the viewer ca…

The makings of identities: personal identity is guided by an invisible apparatus. This apparatus is ever-changing. Surveillance data is con…

The Chit Chat Club is an experiment in bringing people together in a mixed physical and virtual environment. Online chatrooms and real worl…

Visual Who is a tool for visualizing an electronic community. Using data such as mailing list subscriptions, it creates a spring-based mode…

In the Renaissance, kings rarely traveled to find a bride: instead, an artist was sent to paint her likeness. These artisans were often not…

The first of this project's two goals is to enable those with internalized, psychologically distressing states to speak their own stories o…

The goal of the TeleReporter project is to design a system that allows for complete and open interaction between news providers and the new…

Alternative Autobiographies explores Richard Kostelanetz's long-time interest in describing a life (in this case, his own) in books and ele…

Affective Circles combines the Chat Circles 2 interface with affective information, including skin conductivity data, to enhance online com…

In the Renaissance, kings rarely traveled to find a bride rather an artist was sent to paint her likeness. These artisans were often not th…

A study in the roles of different facial features as used by social groups for communication. The goal is to be able to render faces as car…

The CurlyCart is a modification of a Power Wheels toy that can record and play back your motions.

ChatScape is a chat environment in which user-programmable autonomous behaviors are part of the communication repertoire. We are developin…

ChessMates is a collaborative chess game. Building on the TeleAction framework, ChessMates allows two communities of players to play chess …

In the real world, people clothe themselves in garments whose cut and design encodes information about the social identity of the wearer. T…

Hear&There; is an augmented reality system using audio as the primary interface. Using the authoring component of this system, individuals …

Curtains blends the aesthetics of everyday home design with sensing technology. Whereas today a sensor commonly augments a device, with Cur…

Coterie is an emerging series of experiments in the dynamic visualizations of online communities. Coterie reintroduces a human element to a…

Talking In Circles is an audioconferencing chat environment. Unlike traditional text-based chat environments, Talking In Circles allows par…

Currently, Web users have little knowledge about the activities of fellow users. They cannot see the flow of on-line crowds or identify cen…

The VisiGeek displayer enables the visual comparison of otherwise non-visual datasets. The visualizer highlights differences in the data us…

LaserWho is large-scale gesture-based installation of the Visual Who project that uses the LaserWall for display and input. Users place anc…

Loom creates visualizations of the participants and interactions in a threaded newsgroup. The renderings reveal patterns indicative of pe…

Plateau is a Java toolkit that aides developers in building scaleable collaborative applications. Collaborative applications rely on the tr…

Collections is an application for the management of digital pictures according to their intended audiences. The goal is to create a graphic…

With The Diorama Project we are putting virtual objects in real world spaces. Our goal is to create a system that allows people to build a…

Visiphone is a communication sculpture that visualizes the sounds flowing between two distant locations. A continuous audio connection betw…