Guest lecture, "Interactive Multimodal Platforms," Susan C. Herring, March 21

Posted by Robert Branciforte on

Interactive multimodal platforms (IMPs) allow Internet users to comment on content in multiple modes, for example:

  • YouTube. Users may respond either via text or video to YouTube videos.
  • World of Warcraft. Players may engage in real-time chat via text or voice.
  • VoiceThread.com. Participants may comment on multimedia slide shows via text, audio, or video.
  • Google+ social network site. Allows video chat in addition to text chat, private email, and text comments on one’s ‘profile.’
  • Facebook added video chat to its suite of textual communication options.

Multimodal commenting environments raise questions about:

  • Why and to what effect people communicate in a given mode, and
  • Whether platforms can and should be engineered to optimize mode use that produces specific outcomes.

Dr.  Herring will outline a research agenda for a systematic study of communication in IMPs that provide multiple communication modes.

Presented by the School of Library & Information Studies, College of Communication & Information:

  • Wednesday, March 21, 2012
  • 2:00 PM
  • Goldstein Library, Shores Building

About Susan C. Herring. Susan C. Herring is Professor of Information Science and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, where she directs the doctoral program in the School of Library & Information Science. Trained in linguistics, she was one of the first scholars to apply discourse analysis methods to computer-mediated communication (CMC), initially with a focus on gender issues. She has published numerous works on CMC and is editor of the online journal Language@Internet and a past editor of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Her current research interests include multilingual and multimodal CMC.