Fostering Collaboration for Global Impact
Research
At CITS we seek to inspire and support interdisciplinary research teams composed of nationally and internationally recognized scholars to study how societies and social groups are affected by information technologies and how social dynamics influence technological innovation and diffusion. We create opportunities and provide resources to support our affiliates from the earliest stages of project design, to the development of proposals for external funding, through the completion and publication of their research.
In order to encourage the establishment of interdisciplinary research teams, CITS provides space and financial resources for establishing topical working groups. For example, our "New Media and Trust" working group organized by computer scientists and communication scholars resulted in a U. S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, Towards Automating Privacy Controls for Online Social Networks, and culminated in several publications. As a direct result of our "Internet Infrastructure and ICTD" working group initiative, affiliates from Computer Science and Film and Media Studies also received a large NSF grant titled "VillageNet: Intelligent Wireless Networks for Rural Areas". In this collaborative project, faculty and graduate students who had deep contextual/cultural knowledge worked side by side with the computer scientists to assure the remote network technology they were developing in Zambia was appropriate for the sociocultural context in which they were operating. The lack of political as well as technical infrastructure and need for cell phone technology were highlighted in field interviews providing the groundwork for the technological developments. The look, feel, and even the name of the software the computer scientists developed were an interdisciplinary enterprise. This project has now been expanded to include the Za'atari refugee camp (Jordan) and Native American reservations and involves several CITS graduate student affiliates as well as a visiting scholar.
An ongoing project, "Visibility Management and Transparency in the Digital Age," exemplifies the interdisciplinary and international thrust of the center. CITS faculty affiliates from the Department of Communication and the Technology Management Department have established a long-term collaborative effort with international partners from the Copenhagen Business School and the University of Amsterdam. Their project views transparency as one form of "visibility management" and addresses theoretical and empirical questions related to whether and how digital technologies fundamentally alter organizational and employee decisions and perceptions about what to disclose and to whom. They examine how the flow of information and possibilities for insight and scrutiny are controlled in a digitally ubiquitous environment. The project is grounded in the proposition that visibility is the root affordance of the digital age and that the increasing normative expectations regarding organizational transparency and visibility across corporate, governmental, and nonprofit sectors have both large-scale intended and unintended consequences.
Growing out of several workshops in the US and Europe that were co-sponsored by CITS, the Orfalea Center for Global & International Studies at UCSB, and the Copenhagen Business School, the research team co-edited a special section of the International Journal of Communication. The section contextualized the discussion of digital technologies and visibilities in relation to current concerns about surveillance, transparency and secrecy. The research papers articulated the workings of various forms of visibility management, theorized as a fundamental social process as well as an analytical vocabulary to explore the explicit and implicit consequences of attempts to act on the world by digitally controlling and facilitating possibilities for seeing, knowing and governing. These papers rethink notions of transparency and visibility in at least four ways: "They remind us that transparency does not emerge sui generis - it is managed; they turn our attention to the variety of metaphors and mechanisms through which we enact transparency; they nudge us to incorporate other senses into our communicative research; and they put transparency in a context of power relations and asymmetrical capacities".
A second set of studies is now emerging from this collaborative venture. Working with a CITS visiting scholar from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research they have developed an Organizational Visibility Scale that decouples visibility from transparency and enables scholars to explore the relationships among information technology, organizational visibility, transparency, trust, and other critical organizational outcomes. The psychometric properties of the scale suggest it is both a valid and reliable instrument in the American setting and it is now being tested in European context.
Other recent CITS research initiatives have brought together faculty and graduate students interested in using computational science to support social scientific and humanistic research. CITS supported the expansion of the Social Media Archive and Analytics program , R-Shief, a software program conceptualized and developed by a Film and Media Studies affiliate and computer scientists. This archive consists of over twenty-six billion social media posts in more than seventy languages and has been used by scholars and practitioners from social sciences, humanities, and engineering to conduct computational and textual analysis on social media and digital activism.
A major vehicle for the support of these types of interdisciplinary and international research initiatives is the CITS Visiting Scholars Program which began in 2011. Each year we have at least 3 residential scholars from within and outside the United States for periods ranging from 2 weeks to a full academic year. Visiting scholars receive office space and access to University resources. They meet regularly with graduate students and faculty and participate in CITS sponsored research lectures and symposia. In 2017, we instituted a Research Fellow designation which provides for an official affiliation with the University for a three-year term. CITS appointed two research fellows this year: Dennis Del Favero, Chair Professor of Digital Innovation and Scientia Professor at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; and Mikkel Flyverbom, Professor of Communication and Digital Transformations at the Department of Management, Society and Communication, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.