Research

During its operational period (2006-2009) this website was dedicated to documenting, understanding, and utilizing the Social Network Service (SNS) Facebook.com. The work linked to here is primarily academic - an endeavor to understand an important social forces in operation behind what many would allege is a potential paradigm shift in the internet. Beyond this there was some limited effort to examine and discover ways Facebook might be applied as a tool - towards education, activism, librarianship or other worthy ends.

(Original) Primary Contributors and Reseachers (2006 - 2009)

The Facebook Project had several contributors, who have now all moved on.

Jeff Ginger - A graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. At the time of writing he was working on his masters in sociology, but has since moved on to pursue a PhD in Library and Information Science. His current work can be found at http://www.jeffginger.com.

Jenny Ryan - Completed completed her MA in anthropology at Wesleyan University, where she conducted ethnographic research on the online social networking sites MySpace, Facebook, and Tribe.net. Currently, she is a PhD student at the University of Southern California, San Diego, spending her days building collaborative community-based networks, exploring new tools and web-based applications for information organization and visualization as well as digital storytelling and group coordination.

Eric Gilbert - Was never a direct contributor to this website, but instead helped to inform its direction and research through his own work and a reading group he and Jeff shared together. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the Unversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, under the supervision of Karrie Karahalios, working in Human-Computer Interaction because, in general, he likes people more than he likes computers. His website, less often updated now that he has a faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has most of his award winning papers and recent exploits.

Matthew Kushin and Kelin Kitchener - Joined on late in the development, at the time working at different institutions:

Matthew J. Kushin (M.A., University of Miami) is a Ph.D. student studying new media in the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University.  His research focuses on the political utility of social media. He teaches an undergraduate class about new communication technology.

Kelin Kitchener is currently pursuing her M.A. in English from University of Idaho. She received her B.S. from Radford University. Her current thesis project focuses on the rhetoric of torture and how torture messages are spread. She incorporates discourse analysis of Facebook group postings as one example of new technologies that aid in the spread of torture messages. Her professional interests include editing and technical writing.

Together they contributed one paper:

Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch - Is, at the time of this writing, a late-stage Ph.D. student in Mass Communications at Penn State University, in the area of Media Effects. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Portland State University in 2005 and her area of research is in what can be tentatively called "new" media, or more appropriately "interactive" media, such as the Internet, video games, mediated collaborative spaces, and virtual reality. Her focus is on the social and psychological factors of these media in which users are also creators (e.g. on sites such as Youtube, Digg, Flickr). Check out Anne's website.

Papers from Anne:

Undergraduate Paper Collection

We made a little effort to collect undergrad papers, but it never really took off. Contact Jeff to post your work.