Miriam Metzger
Miriam Metzger’s research centers on issues of trust in the digital media environment. Her work focuses on two aspects of trust: (1) how people determine who and what to trust online (i.e., the credibility of digital information and sources), and (2) how people manage their privacy in the digital environment. She is currently involved in projects that are examining credibility within dynamic digital environments that explore new questions about how information quality and source identification and authentication can be established, as well as how people negotiate their privacy within online social networks.
Recommended Readings & Links:
The most interesting ideas that I’ve seen lately have to do with how people cope with large amounts of information through the use of cognitive heuristics or mental “shortcuts.” I think the work of cognitive psychologists, Gigerenzer and Todd is fascinating, and I’m very intrigued by Pirolli research on information foraging theory and the concept of “information scent.” I’m also interested in tools that are being designed that capitalize on this drive toward heuristics—visualization tools that rely on metadata to help users understand information and make sense of it. Some examples include edit history visualizations in wikipedia, such as wikidashboard and the wiki trust coloring project. See below for references.
- Gigerenzer, G., & Todd, P. M. (1999). Simple heuristics that make us smart. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Pirolli, P. (2005). Rational analyses of information foraging on the Web. Cognitive Science, 29, 343-373.
- Trust Coloring. Luca de Alfaro, B. Thomas Adler, Krishnendu Chatterjeee, Iam Pye, Vishwanath Raman, Marco Faella, UCSC Wiki Lab http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/
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