The Challenge of Peer-Produced Websites

Type any topic into a search engine. A Wikipedia entry is likely to show up in the results, written by people with an interest in the topic. Wikipedia is the most ubiquitous example of “peer production” websites, which are sites dependent on a community of unpaid content contributors. Built through the mass aggregation of small contributions, … Read More

Ph.D. student receives Humanities Scholarship for research on Asian women content creators

UW Communication Ph.D. candidate Jenny Lee was recently awarded UW’s prestigious Elizabeth Kerr Macfarlane Humanities Scholarship, a merit-based scholarship that acknowledges her contribution to the field of humanities. Lee’s research examines how Korean female content creators make sense of, negotiate with, and challenge the dominant ways Asian femininity is commodified and consumed in the transnational … Read More

CCDE launches Health Equity Action Lab

The Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity (CCDE) this spring launched its Health Equity Action Lab (HEAL), a new initiative that aims to support and showcase community-based research in the arena of health equity and to provide a platform for research that examines the accessibility of health resources. Dr. Carmen Gonzalez, a UW Communication faculty … Read More

Students investigate online communities by contributing to Wikipedia in innovative course

COM 481: Online Communities, taught by PhD candidate Kaylea Champion, offers students a hands-on experience contributing to online communities such as Wikipedia by incorporating research conducted by the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC), a research team that employs empirical research methods to understand and inform the design of collaborative online communities. The course explores computer-mediated … Read More