Research Portfolio – SHELLY FARNHAM

Research Interests

My expertise as an innovation researcher has been applied to the design, development, and evaluation of both real-world communities and online social technologies, across world-class industry, government, and startup organizations, including Microsoft Research, Yahoo!, Facebook, Google, the City of Seattle, the Town of Skykomish, O’Reilly Media, Pathable, and Zillow. As a researcher working primarily with early-stage, interdisciplinary incubation teams, my role is as often that of creative director as social scientist.

My research interests include creative collaboration, interdisciplinary art, civic technology, social media, online community tools, social networks, identity management, social engagement, mobile social, and social data.

Below are recent or notable projects. Please see my CV for a full list of related publications.

Research Skills

community and user research (surveys, interviews, field studies, lab studies, focus groups)
social data analytics (usage analysis, statistics, instrumentation, data mining, data curation)
prototyping (proof-of-concept, web user interfaces, algorithms, backend-databases, .Net/Javascript/SQL)
research management (research projects and people including researchers and interns)
knowledge sharing (lectures, workshops, publications, conferences, mentorship).

Research Projects Portfolio

Facebook Business Fraud

As a senior researcher contractor at Facebook, I studied the predictors of international fraud in the context of Facebook’s business management tools. This was internal research and under NDA.

A Culture of Innovation

Community Research and Literature Review

While at Google on a two year, senior researcher contract, I performed an intensive analysis of Google’s existing leadership practices and how that may or may not have impacted the development of a culture of innovation. This research included analytics across diverse Google datasets to assess the impact of social practices on innovation outcomes. This was internal research and under NDA.

Skyvine (Internal ticketing tool, variant of the Google Universal Ticketing System)

User Research

Skyvine was an internal ticketing system unique to Google’s culture supporting structured collaboration across teams around internal technology support processes. I spent almost two years as both a user researcher assessing the design and deployment of this technology, but also performed extensive analytics of existing social ticketing behavior to help support the design process, including providing an novel overview of the internal help ecosystem and supporting tools. This was internal research and under NDA.

Spokin

Prototype

Spokin was an online web site with community-curated networking, allowing you to connect with your local communities — your neighborhood, city, or nearby interest groups — so you can work together to get things done. We expired Spokin in 2018 to shift our focus to collaboration spaces and events.

The Data is In: How to Improve your Neighborhood Community’s Wellbeing (Ignite Talk)

Presentation

As a citizen, a community organizer, or a local business, what can you do to improve the wellbeing of your neighborhood community? This talk outlines the most impactful ways to improve your neighborhood based on our years of research. See youtube video here.

Community Well-being Report Pages Using Open Data and Social Media

Prototype

As a part of the Data Science for Social Good summer incubator program at the UW eScience Institute, we created neighborhood community report pages in the context of our hyperlocal, crowd-sourced community network (Spokin). A key aspect of this project was to explore novel ways to leverage diverse social media and open data sources to dynamically assess community-level well-being.

See our end of summer project summary slides or Spokin Intro Slides.

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Analyzing Social Media Data: Tools and Tips

Lecture / Course

The goal of this lecture was to provide practical tips for collecting and analyzing social media data. We originally developed this lecture/course for CHI 2013, and have subsequently given it as an invited speaker to a number of programs (including University of Washington, Syracuse, and University of Michigan).

See slides.

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Fostering a Community of Innovation at the Intersection of Art and Technology

Workshop

To help foster the growing community of artists/technologists in the Pacific Northwest, we organized a workshop bringing together key stakeholders in the region, as a collaboration between Microsoft Research, Cornish College of the Arts, and the Genius Foundation. The workshop was structured as a focus group including a brief questionnaire to generate feedback for how to best support this community.

See paper (Cornish), paper (ISEA2015) or slides.

Farnham S., Brice, J., Tremblay, G., & Pinto da Silva, A. (2015). Fostering a Community of Innovation at the Intersection of Art and Technology in the Pacific Northwest. ISEA 2015.

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Neighborhood Study

Field Research & Twitter Data Analytics

In this study, performed while at Microsoft Research, we adopted a multi-method approach to examine whether the growing use of social media as a channel for hyper-local conversation may provide meaningful insights into the well-being of neighborhood communities. First, through interviews and a questionnaire we explored what are indicators of neighborhood level well-being, and what are current communication practices around the use of social media to support community well-being. Second, through an analysis of neighborhood-level Twitter messages we examined the extent to which Twitter conversations corresponded with our neighborhood well-being indicators.

See paper or slides.

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Whooly (Now Spokin Updates): What’s Happening in Your Hyperlocal Community on Twitter

Prototypting with Algorithm Development and Lab Study

While at Microsoft Research we developed and evaluated Whooly, an experimental web service that provided neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whooly further automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a lab study.

See paper or online prototype (now Spokin Updates).

Hu, Yuheng, Farnham, S., Monroy-Hernandez, A. (2013). Whoo.ly: Facilitating information-seeking for informal hyperlocal communities using social media. In Proceedings of CHI, 2013. Honorable Mention.

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So.cl as Learning Network

Longitudinal Deployment Study

So.cl is a FUSE Labs, Microsoft Research experimental web application that combines web browsing, search, and social networking for the purposes of sharing and learning around topics of interest. We performed a deployment study examining existing learning practices around search and social networking for students, and how these practices shifted when participants adopted So.cl

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Lahav, M., Raskino, D., Cheng, L., Ickman, T., Laird-McConnell, T. (2012). So.cl: An interest network for informal learning. In Proceedings of ICWSM 2012. Best Paper Nomination.

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Youth Civic Engagement and Social Media

Large Scale Questionnaire Study

While at Microsoft Research and in collaboration with the City of Seattle, we performed a large scale questionnaire study examining factors that impact teen civic engagement through social technologies.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Keyes, D., Yuki, V., Tugwell, C. (2013). Modeling youth civic engagement in the new world of networked publics. In Proceedings of AAAI International Conference of Social Media and Weblogs.

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Puget Sound Off and Youth Citizen Journalism

Deployment Evaluation Study

Puget Sound Off is a City of Seattle online blogging and networking site focused on helping youth connect, collaborate, and take action around local community issues. We performed an evaluation study for the City of Seattle seeking lessons learned from a real world deployment.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Keyes, D., Yuki, V., Tugwell, C. (2012). Puget Sound Off: Fostering youth civic engagement through citizen journalism. In Proceedings of ACM 2012 CSCW.

Docs.com: Social File Sharing in Facebook

Usage Analysis

This usage analysis of Docs.com was performed while at Microsoft Research. Docs.com integrates Microsoft Office web documents with Facebook. We examined how people share docs in the context of a social network, including types of documents shared, and how people used the relationship sharing settings. We further performed a factor analysis of user activity to find four primary types of usage – sharing, creating, collaborating, and consuming.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S. D., Turski, A., Halai, S. (2012). Docs.com: Social file sharing in Facebook. In Proceedings of Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.

Faceted Identity and Life Modes in Social Media

Questionnaire Study and Design Probe Lab Study

Performed a large scale questionnaire study for Yahoo! examining how people facet their identities, and how these facets are expressed through use of email and Facebook. We found family was an extremely important context for sharing online, that email was still a preferred form of communication for private sharing across facets of life, and a higher level of facet incompatibility was correlated with increased email usage and worry about sharing in social networks. We then performed a design probe lab study to solicit user feedback for different design solutions for faceting identity across social media tools.

See slides, faceted identity paper, or life modes design probe paper.

Farnham, S. & Churchill, E. F. (2011). Faceted identity, faceted lives: Social and technical issues in being yourself online. In Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2011.

Ozenc. K. & Farnham, S. (2011). Life modes in social media. In Proceedings of CHI 2011.

Cocollage: Networking Tool for “Third Place” Community Development

Longitudinal Deployment Study

CoCollage is a placed-based community technology developed by Strands Labs that leverages the power of online social networking to facilitate awareness and face-to-face interactions in a third place (coffee shops). We performed a longitudinal deployment study with usage analysis, exploring adoption and usage patterns in a cafe, and its impact on community development and place-based attachment.

See paper (short), paper (long), or slides.

Farnham, S., McCarthy, J., Patel, Y., Ahuja, S., Norman, D., Hazlewood, W., Lind, J. (2009). Measuring the impact of place attachment on the adoption of a place-based community technology. In Proceedings of CHI 2009.

McCarthy, J., Farnham, S., Patel, Y., et al. (2009). Supporting community in third places with situated social software. In Communities and Technologies, 2009.

Collaboration/Communication Challenges Following Katrina Hurricane

Observational Field Study

In order to better understand the challenges specific to the deployment of collaboration technologies in crisis situations, we conducted an observational field study of the deployment of Groove Virtual Office to various civil and military groups at the heart of the disaster zone over the course of ten days. We summarize both general lessons learned from observations of social and communication challenges in crisis situations that impact technology adoption, and make specific recommendations for improving the deployment process of Groove to enable cross group collaboration.

See paper or slides.

Farnham, S., Kirkpatrick, R., Pedersen, E. (2006). Observation of Katrina/Rita deployment: Addressing social and communication challenges of ephemeral groups. In Proceedings of ISCRAM 2006, Newark, New Jersey.