Download - IMPACT Magazine Fall 09
NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research
2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online
People are communicating as easily through social media as with
their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in
someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?
Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the
first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is
seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds
algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.
“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says
Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-
viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make
specific choices based on that data.”
This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie
review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess
the level of user trust in secure communications between members of
the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.
Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might
support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building
computational models that determine how much trust a commander
could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,
and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the
military better process the information. m
impact profiles
LESLIE WALKER
UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters
Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future
research & education spotlight
Doug Reside uses the same care and
meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-
itally created art as other scholars do in
archiving handwritten drafts of literary,
artistic or musical masterpieces.
The assistant director of the
Maryland Institute for Technology
in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside
researches how digital technologies
are changing the creation of American
musical theater.
He is working with the Library of
Congress to preserve the digital files
of the Tony Award-winning musical
“Rent,” which the family of late com-
poser and playwright Jonathan Larson
willed to the federal institution.
In addition to hard-copy drafts of
“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost
150 floppy disks that contained earlier
versions of the musical before its 1996
Broadway premiere. Also included
in the archived material are specific
sound effects that Larson created us-
ing now-obsolete technologies.
“We feel it important that the
original files need to be preserved in
the way they were conceived,” says
Reside, who has degrees in English
and computer science. m
Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium
Impact is published by the Office of the Vice President for Research and is mailed to members of the mid-Atlantic research community and others who have an inter-est in the latest research at the University of Maryland.
Your comments and feedback are welcome; please e-mail your comments to [email protected] or fax them to Anne Geroni-mo, executive editor, at 301.314.9569.
If for any reason you would not like to receive this publication, contact us using the same information above.
PUBLISHER
Mel BernsteinVice President for Research
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development
MANAGING EDITOR
Tom Ventsias
CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
John T. Consoli
ART DIRECTOR
Jeanette J. Nelson
Cover and feature art include the following digital works:
Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and
Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul
S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;
Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair
by Richard Hutten.
The 2008 presidential election was historic in
many ways, not the least of which was the surge
of interest and involvement from young and
minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows
(pictured above) spent this summer studying
these emerging political voices to gain insight
into how they are influencing American voting
behavior and attitudes.
The fellowships were part of News21, a
national journalism program sponsored in part
by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
A key part of the project was incorporating new
technologies—including a talking bar chart and
a video player that blends linear and nonlinear
storytelling—into the reporting process, says
adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-
fessor in Digital Innovation.
“In the face of the Internet and disruptive
change, the news media must innovate if they
are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe
the change agents who will reinvent news and
preserve the values of journalism are young
journalists like our News21 fellows.”
Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was
a longtime reporter and columnist who spent
more than a decade covering the digital media
for The Washington Post. To view the project, go
to www.thenewvoters.com. m
IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009
impactoverview
LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m
KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.
In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m
CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.
One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of
making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.
“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy
Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m
impactoverview research, scholarship
& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of
America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via
140-character “tweets,” President Obama
is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-
care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to
put its entire 137 million-object collection online.
Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,
social networking and the creation of digital art and
literature, is changing who we are and how we live.
Faculty and students at the University of Maryland
are exploring these new media tools, examining how
people interact online and fostering digital creativ-
ity to address the most relevant questions regarding
information and society.
In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic
is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly
get their news online and traditional media have had
to rethink how they do business. New media tools
empower news consumers as well as journalists, says
Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis
on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-
neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their
passion and independently market their work to fill a
niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which
the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and
disseminates news and information.
Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,
as a free society depends upon an informed popu-
lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many
newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”
he says. “We need to train students what that means
for them—they’re going to have to be much more
self-sufficient.”
Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s
iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to
interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-
ing that interaction, even as technology evolves
at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that
technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing
the social implications of that technology,” says Dean
Jenny Preece.
Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on
a project to determine the role that public libraries
might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s
Center for Library and Information Innovation, which
Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the
American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation for a national survey of public
library Internet connectivity.
The research expands upon data collection by
Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005
after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow
to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost
their homes, Internet access and personal computers,
they go to a public library to access trusted information
and services from government agencies like FEMA,”
Bertot says. “How people search for information in
an emergency, how they access services and how the
federal government can streamline e-government is
what we’re interested in.”
The iSchool offers training for information
specialists through graduate programs and profes-
sional development courses designed specifically for
government information experts. Maryland faculty
are also conducting groundbreaking research in data
management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well
as information policy, children’s use of technology,
online communities and social networks.
“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-
ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to
design technology to support people better and how
these new technologies impact and change society,”
says Preece.
MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-
ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual
hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-
ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,
MITH innovates with technology across creative,
scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently
hosted an international conference on topics such as
how to preserve art, culture and records that were
created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what
will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we
do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going
to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.
MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-
ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland
undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in
activities including digital music and video production,
digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds
and the development of software and online com-
munities. “There is a new generation of young people
today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing
and designing new pieces in the humanities in an
entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,
associate director of MITH, who will lead the new
program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific
home. Now they will.”
To view the latest research
in Maryland’s iSchool, visit
www.ischool.umd.edu. For
more on journalism, go to
www.journalism.umd.edu;
for MITH, go to www.mith.
umd.edu.
impactoverview
LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m
KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.
In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m
CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.
One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of
making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.
“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy
Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m
impactoverview research, scholarship
& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of
America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via
140-character “tweets,” President Obama
is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-
care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to
put its entire 137 million-object collection online.
Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,
social networking and the creation of digital art and
literature, is changing who we are and how we live.
Faculty and students at the University of Maryland
are exploring these new media tools, examining how
people interact online and fostering digital creativ-
ity to address the most relevant questions regarding
information and society.
In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic
is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly
get their news online and traditional media have had
to rethink how they do business. New media tools
empower news consumers as well as journalists, says
Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis
on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-
neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their
passion and independently market their work to fill a
niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which
the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and
disseminates news and information.
Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,
as a free society depends upon an informed popu-
lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many
newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”
he says. “We need to train students what that means
for them—they’re going to have to be much more
self-sufficient.”
Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s
iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to
interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-
ing that interaction, even as technology evolves
at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that
technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing
the social implications of that technology,” says Dean
Jenny Preece.
Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on
a project to determine the role that public libraries
might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s
Center for Library and Information Innovation, which
Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the
American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation for a national survey of public
library Internet connectivity.
The research expands upon data collection by
Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005
after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow
to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost
their homes, Internet access and personal computers,
they go to a public library to access trusted information
and services from government agencies like FEMA,”
Bertot says. “How people search for information in
an emergency, how they access services and how the
federal government can streamline e-government is
what we’re interested in.”
The iSchool offers training for information
specialists through graduate programs and profes-
sional development courses designed specifically for
government information experts. Maryland faculty
are also conducting groundbreaking research in data
management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well
as information policy, children’s use of technology,
online communities and social networks.
“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-
ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to
design technology to support people better and how
these new technologies impact and change society,”
says Preece.
MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-
ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual
hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-
ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,
MITH innovates with technology across creative,
scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently
hosted an international conference on topics such as
how to preserve art, culture and records that were
created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what
will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we
do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going
to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.
MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-
ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland
undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in
activities including digital music and video production,
digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds
and the development of software and online com-
munities. “There is a new generation of young people
today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing
and designing new pieces in the humanities in an
entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,
associate director of MITH, who will lead the new
program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific
home. Now they will.”
To view the latest research
in Maryland’s iSchool, visit
www.ischool.umd.edu. For
more on journalism, go to
www.journalism.umd.edu;
for MITH, go to www.mith.
umd.edu.
impactoverview
LOCATIONThe university’s location just outside of Washington, D.C., offers a trove of resources for Maryland fac-ulty, students and visiting scholars. These include the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Press Club and the National Science Foundation, as well as scores of other agencies, think tanks and nonprofits that assess and develop the nation’s digital future. m
KNIGHT HALLThe $30 million John S. and James L. Knight Hall, the new home for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, is set to open in January 2010. The building (shown below in an artist’s rendering) will be transparent and open—reflecting the goals of good journalism—and a high-tech training ground for a new era in the industry. It will feature several multimedia labs, including one that will allow graduate students to explore, design and test new-media concepts for reporting and delivering news. “Innova-tion in journalism must include developing, testing and using new storytelling techniques that keep audiences engaged,” says Assistant Professor Ronald Yaros, who helped design the lab.
In its classrooms, faculty like Associate Professor Ira Chinoy will help students learn to seek and use public records that exist in digital form, but are unavailable on the Internet. Though the law deems government records “public” unless they are subject to specific exemptions, students approaching state, county or local agencies often meet resistance when requesting records in database form, says Chinoy. “We spend a lot of time trying to understand the motivations for denial of access. These can include all sorts of fears, some of which stem from a lack of understanding of the ease with which these databases might be copied in digital form,” he says. “Understanding this resistance is a big step in changing the dynamics.” m
CLOUD COMPUTING CENTERThe Cloud Computing Center is an interdisciplinary project with faculty researchers from the iSchool, computer science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. With funding from Google, IBM, Amazon and the National Science Foundation, the research focuses on interconnecting banks of computers worldwide that can process and search through very large volumes of data.
One project is developing technologies for building a scalable and reliable infrastructure for the long-term access and preservation of digital assets. Another project tackles the problem of
making information available on a global scale across the world’s languages, using the richly linked structure of Wikipedia to help improve automatic language translation.
“Cloud computing represents a potential paradigm shift, and the center hopes to cement the university’s leadership position in this emerging field,” says Jimmy
Lin, associate professor in the iSchool and director of the center. m
impactoverview research, scholarship
& the digital future01011001 ou needn’t look far to catch a glimpse of
America’s digital future: The New York Times is transmitting breaking news via
140-character “tweets,” President Obama
is using Facebook to inform the nation of his health-
care agenda, and the Smithsonian Institution plans to
put its entire 137 million-object collection online.
Technology, through online media, wireless Internet,
social networking and the creation of digital art and
literature, is changing who we are and how we live.
Faculty and students at the University of Maryland
are exploring these new media tools, examining how
people interact online and fostering digital creativ-
ity to address the most relevant questions regarding
information and society.
In the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, the topic
is not only timely, but urgent, as people increasingly
get their news online and traditional media have had
to rethink how they do business. New media tools
empower news consumers as well as journalists, says
Dean Kevin Klose. His school is putting a new emphasis
on the burgeoning, Web-centered fields of “entrepre-
neurial journalism,” in which journalists focus on their
passion and independently market their work to fill a
niche, as well as “participatory journalism,” in which
the public actively collects, reports, analyzes and
disseminates news and information.
Highly skilled journalists will remain in demand,
as a free society depends upon an informed popu-
lace, Klose says. “We’ll see the workforce at many
newspapers dispersed from a centralized location,”
he says. “We need to train students what that means
for them—they’re going to have to be much more
self-sufficient.”
Humans and TechnologyIn the College of Information Studies, Maryland’s
iSchool, faculty aren’t just teaching students how to
interact in a changing digital world. They’re study-
ing that interaction, even as technology evolves
at a dizzying pace. “It’s always been the case that
technology runs far ahead of the research analyzing
the social implications of that technology,” says Dean
Jenny Preece.
Professor John Bertot is principal investigator on
a project to determine the role that public libraries
might play in a national emergency. The iSchool’s
Center for Library and Information Innovation, which
Bertot directs, has received $1 million from the
American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation for a national survey of public
library Internet connectivity.
The research expands upon data collection by
Bertot and Assistant Professor Paul Jaeger in 2005
after Hurricane Katrina delivered a devastating blow
to New Orleans. “We found that when people have lost
their homes, Internet access and personal computers,
they go to a public library to access trusted information
and services from government agencies like FEMA,”
Bertot says. “How people search for information in
an emergency, how they access services and how the
federal government can streamline e-government is
what we’re interested in.”
The iSchool offers training for information
specialists through graduate programs and profes-
sional development courses designed specifically for
government information experts. Maryland faculty
are also conducting groundbreaking research in data
management, storage, retrieval and analysis as well
as information policy, children’s use of technology,
online communities and social networks.
“The key issues we want to address are accessibil-
ity, usability and sociability. We want to learn how to
design technology to support people better and how
these new technologies impact and change society,”
says Preece.
MITHThe Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humani-
ties, or MITH, is the university’s primary intellectual
hub for scholars and practitioners of digital humani-
ties. Based in the College of Arts and Humanities,
MITH innovates with technology across creative,
scholarly and pedagogical disciplines, and recently
hosted an international conference on topics such as
how to preserve art, culture and records that were
created in a digital format. “We don’t yet know what
will become the lasting art forms of our time, but we
do know if we can’t save any of it, that nothing is going
to be there for the future,” says Director Neil Fraistat.
MITH will launch a two-year living and learn-
ing program in the digital humanities for Maryland
undergraduates next fall. Students will get involved in
activities including digital music and video production,
digital art, creative electronic writing, virtual worlds
and the development of software and online com-
munities. “There is a new generation of young people
today—we call them ‘digital natives’—who are writing
and designing new pieces in the humanities in an
entirely digital format,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum,
associate director of MITH, who will lead the new
program. “Up till now they didn’t have a specific
home. Now they will.”
To view the latest research
in Maryland’s iSchool, visit
www.ischool.umd.edu. For
more on journalism, go to
www.journalism.umd.edu;
for MITH, go to www.mith.
umd.edu.
NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research
2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online
People are communicating as easily through social media as with
their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in
someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?
Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the
first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is
seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds
algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.
“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says
Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-
viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make
specific choices based on that data.”
This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie
review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess
the level of user trust in secure communications between members of
the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.
Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might
support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building
computational models that determine how much trust a commander
could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,
and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the
military better process the information. m
impact profiles
LESLIE WALKER
UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters
Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future
research & education spotlight
Doug Reside uses the same care and
meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-
itally created art as other scholars do in
archiving handwritten drafts of literary,
artistic or musical masterpieces.
The assistant director of the
Maryland Institute for Technology
in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside
researches how digital technologies
are changing the creation of American
musical theater.
He is working with the Library of
Congress to preserve the digital files
of the Tony Award-winning musical
“Rent,” which the family of late com-
poser and playwright Jonathan Larson
willed to the federal institution.
In addition to hard-copy drafts of
“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost
150 floppy disks that contained earlier
versions of the musical before its 1996
Broadway premiere. Also included
in the archived material are specific
sound effects that Larson created us-
ing now-obsolete technologies.
“We feel it important that the
original files need to be preserved in
the way they were conceived,” says
Reside, who has degrees in English
and computer science. m
Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium
Impact is published by the Office of the Vice President for Research and is mailed to members of the mid-Atlantic research community and others who have an inter-est in the latest research at the University of Maryland.
Your comments and feedback are welcome; please e-mail your comments to [email protected] or fax them to Anne Geroni-mo, executive editor, at 301.314.9569.
If for any reason you would not like to receive this publication, contact us using the same information above.
PUBLISHER
Mel BernsteinVice President for Research
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development
MANAGING EDITOR
Tom Ventsias
CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
John T. Consoli
ART DIRECTOR
Jeanette J. Nelson
Cover and feature art include the following digital works:
Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and
Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul
S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;
Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair
by Richard Hutten.
The 2008 presidential election was historic in
many ways, not the least of which was the surge
of interest and involvement from young and
minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows
(pictured above) spent this summer studying
these emerging political voices to gain insight
into how they are influencing American voting
behavior and attitudes.
The fellowships were part of News21, a
national journalism program sponsored in part
by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
A key part of the project was incorporating new
technologies—including a talking bar chart and
a video player that blends linear and nonlinear
storytelling—into the reporting process, says
adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-
fessor in Digital Innovation.
“In the face of the Internet and disruptive
change, the news media must innovate if they
are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe
the change agents who will reinvent news and
preserve the values of journalism are young
journalists like our News21 fellows.”
Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was
a longtime reporter and columnist who spent
more than a decade covering the digital media
for The Washington Post. To view the project, go
to www.thenewvoters.com. m
IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009
NONPROFIT ORGUS POSTAGE PAIDPERMIT No. 10COLLEGE PARK, MDOffice of the Vice President for Research
2133 Lee BuildingUniversity of MarylandCollege Park, MD 20742-5121Evaluating Trust Online
People are communicating as easily through social media as with
their cell phone, but how do the messaging nuances heard in
someone’s voice transfer to a status update on Facebook?
Jennifer Golbeck, an assistant professor in the iSchool and one of the
first researchers in the United States to analyze online social networks, is
seeking to answer that question. Trained in computer science, Golbeck builds
algorithms that can estimate levels of trust relationships in social media.
“Trusted information is a powerful source of information,” says
Golbeck. “If you can determine the level of user trust, it allows indi-
viduals—or government agencies and private organizations—to make
specific choices based on that data.”
This can help validate consumer-driven choices like a positive movie
review or product recommendations, and might also be used to assess
the level of user trust in secure communications between members of
the U.S. intelligence community, Golbeck says.
Golbeck is also researching how trust in social networks might
support decision makers in military combat situations. She is building
computational models that determine how much trust a commander
could have in battlefield reports that are contradictory or uncertain,
and how these reports can be annotated and sorted to help the
military better process the information. m
impact profiles
LESLIE WALKER
UM Fellows Use New Media Tools to Define New Voters
Exploring new media Preserving electronic art Mining online dataMaryland researchers are shaping the digital future
research & education spotlight
Doug Reside uses the same care and
meticulous scholarship to preserve dig-
itally created art as other scholars do in
archiving handwritten drafts of literary,
artistic or musical masterpieces.
The assistant director of the
Maryland Institute for Technology
in the Humanities, or MITH, Reside
researches how digital technologies
are changing the creation of American
musical theater.
He is working with the Library of
Congress to preserve the digital files
of the Tony Award-winning musical
“Rent,” which the family of late com-
poser and playwright Jonathan Larson
willed to the federal institution.
In addition to hard-copy drafts of
“Rent,” Reside is reviewing the almost
150 floppy disks that contained earlier
versions of the musical before its 1996
Broadway premiere. Also included
in the archived material are specific
sound effects that Larson created us-
ing now-obsolete technologies.
“We feel it important that the
original files need to be preserved in
the way they were conceived,” says
Reside, who has degrees in English
and computer science. m
Timeless Art, No Matter the Medium
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PUBLISHER
Mel BernsteinVice President for Research
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Anne GeronimoDirector for Research Development
MANAGING EDITOR
Tom Ventsias
CREATIVE DIRECTOR AND PHOTOGRAPHER
John T. Consoli
ART DIRECTOR
Jeanette J. Nelson
Cover and feature art include the following digital works:
Paradise City by Martin Muir; The End, Way Back and
Fall by Airi Pung; Between this year and next, by Paul
S. Dixon; Lego Marmelade2 by Johannes Wessmark;
Daydream Believer by Shanina Conway; and Cloud Chair
by Richard Hutten.
The 2008 presidential election was historic in
many ways, not the least of which was the surge
of interest and involvement from young and
minority voters. A team of 12 journalism fellows
(pictured above) spent this summer studying
these emerging political voices to gain insight
into how they are influencing American voting
behavior and attitudes.
The fellowships were part of News21, a
national journalism program sponsored in part
by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
A key part of the project was incorporating new
technologies—including a talking bar chart and
a video player that blends linear and nonlinear
storytelling—into the reporting process, says
adviser Leslie Walker, the Knight Visiting Pro-
fessor in Digital Innovation.
“In the face of the Internet and disruptive
change, the news media must innovate if they
are to survive,” Walker says. “And I believe
the change agents who will reinvent news and
preserve the values of journalism are young
journalists like our News21 fellows.”
Before joining the Merrill College, Walker was
a longtime reporter and columnist who spent
more than a decade covering the digital media
for The Washington Post. To view the project, go
to www.thenewvoters.com. m
IMPACT Vol. 4 No. 2 | Fall 2009