SocialXLab News

Here are some happy faces of our last lab meeting before the school moved to online courses and students were encouraged to stay home due to the Coronavirus.

Yashwee Kothari and Mahi Gads made their final presentation as part of the NSF iCorps customer discovery program. They are developing a symptom monitoring app for a particular health condition.

The lab was well represented at CHIPLAY, an ACM conference for research on human computer interaction in the context of play and/or games.

Presentations included a full paper about digital patronage- understanding why people subscribe to Twitch streamers (here’s a blog post about the paper written by Pradnya Desai and Dr. Wohn), a full paper about understanding in-game purchasing patterns in Fortnite, and a poster about charity streaming.

Mittal, A., & Wohn, D. Y. (2019). Charity Streaming: Why Charity Organizations Use Live Streams for Fundraising. in Proceedings of ACM CHIPLAY Extended abstracts, 551-556. [pdf]

Wohn, D. Y., Jough, P., Eskander, P., Siri, J. S., Shimobayashi, M., & Desai, P. (2019). Understanding Digital Patronage: Why Do People Subscribe to Streamers on Twitch? Paper in Proceedings of ACM CHIPLAY, 99-110. [pdf]

Cai, J., Wohn, D. Y., Freeman, G. (2019). Who Purchases and Why? Explaining Motivations for In-game Purchasing in the Online Survival Game Fortnite. In Proceedings of ACM CHIPLAY, 391-396.

This weekend four students in our lab participated in TwitchCon, the largest livestreaming convention in the world, where they distributed hundreds of surveys to Twitch users, talked to people in the industry, and learned more about streaming culture. This research is part of a larger study funded through the National Science Foundation’s REU (research experience for undergraduates) program. This project aims to understand how to build a positive internet and supportive online culture.

Our lab welcomes fall of 2019 with some returning members and some new members! We welcome new members Ross, Anmol, Jessy, Nina, Denis, and Mervyn.

Dr. Wohn received a new grant from the National Science Foundation to study content moderation. This collaborative effort with UCLA and University of Michigan is $1.5 million in research funding. NJIT wrote a blurb about this.

Dr. Wohn gave a talk about digital patronage at the Mozilla headquarters in Silicon Valley. The talk was streamed live and archived on YouTube.

Jira Uttarapong and Dr. Wohn attended the International Communication Association annual conference in Washington D.C.

At the Games Anteconference, Jira presented ongoing research on eSports commentators- she was the youngest participant!

Dr. Wohn presented research with Dr. Freeman of Clemson University that looked at cross-media behaviors (gaming, viewing, spending) in the Games Division, and presented a study on volunteer Twitch moderators in the Communication and Technology division.

This past week Dr. Wohn was at the ACM Conference on Human Computer Interaction, where she presented her work on volunteer content moderators