danah boyd
danah boyd is a PhD candidate at the School of Information (SIMS) at the University of California - Berkeley, a Graduate Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center, and a social media researcher at Yahoo!. Her research focuses on how people negotiate a presentation of self to unknown audiences in mediated contexts. In particular, her dissertation is looking at how youth engage with digital publics like MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga and YouTube. She is interested in how the architectural differences between physical and digital publics affect sociality, identity and culture.
Prior to this current project, she studied blogging, articulated social network services (e.g. Friendster, Tribe.net, LinkedIn...). Ms. boyd has written papers on a variety of different topics, from digital backchannels to social visualization design, sexing of internet interactions to creating artifacts for memory work.
Ms. boyd is currently being advised by Peter Lyman at SIMS and Mimi Ito at USC-Annenberg Center. Prior to Berkeley, she was a graduate student in the Sociable Media Group with Judith Donath at the MIT Media Lab. Ms. boyd's master's thesis focused on how people manage their identity presentation in relation to social contextual information. As an undergraduate, she studied computer science at Brown University with Andy van Dam. Her undergrad thesis focused on how sex hormones affect prioritization of depth cues and how this affects use of virtual reality systems.
Outside of research, Ms. boyd has been involved in various activist organizations. For five years, she worked at V-Day, an organization working to end violence against women and girls worldwide.
Appearances
- Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization May 3, 2007
- Social Networking and Chat Sites Teen-Free Zones? September 21, 2006
Biography last updated May 2007